Pinwheel flower tutorial and my beach legal wedding dress

Learn how to make a simple flower pinwheel with this tutorial as I embellish and transform a dress for our beach legal wedding.

We are getting close to a year of being legally married (it will be November 11th to be exact) And I thought I should share here some tutorials I made for my wedding planning blog. This will be the first and one of the most specials to me because is about the transformation I did to the dress I wore for our beach legal ceremony.

When we decided we wanted to get married at the beach we only had 1 week to get everything done and find what we were going to wear, one a very fast shopping day we got Ken a very cool shirt but had no luck trying to find a dress I like in a price I like ( Witch was the hardest part) Until I spotted this dress in the sale section of Sears for $9.99

I thought it had a lot of potential so we bought it and once we got home I grab my scissors and got to work! I cut the length, made some ruffles, rip the necklace off, added normal straps, and finish everything with some pinwheel flowers for the top.

At the end it looked like this:

I remember I learned to make these ones at school when I was little so my dolls used to have pinwheels all over their clothes and hair :)

So now here is the tutorial

Fabric pinwheel flowers

First, you need to cut squares of fabric, the size of the squares have to double the diameter of your desire pinwheel flower.
In my case, I am making 3 different sizes, so I cut a few of 5.5″,  4″ and 3,5″ inches.

Fold your fabric.

Then fold again, and make a square, carefully grab the fabric and cut the corner edge into a smooth curve.

After cutting this is what your piece should look like, unfold it and you'll have a perfect (or not so perfect like in my case) fabric circle.

Facing the right side of the fabric up, you'll need to make big stitches all the way around the circle.

Keep sewing really loosely around it.

and when you finish you'll have something that looks like a bag.

Slowly tie the end and start of threat. Once you have a simple knot, push the center of your pinwheel to the inside.

Now that the edge of your circle is inside the pinwheel secure with a tight knot.

For the center, I used some small beads I happened to have around in a turquoise color.

You can play with them and make different layers, like this one I made with two of them.

or even with 3 of them,  I sew them together before I make the center just to assure they were well attached.

I love these pinwheels because they are super easy to make and super pretty to add details on sashes, headbands, dresses, purses, shoe clips, etc… the options are endless!

And of course, I could not help but share some of my favorite pictures of our Legal ceremony.