“D-I-Y ACCORDION WHEELS”

…so easy to make, a bit labor-intensive (I won’t lie), but the result is very striking and well-worth the effort. We made nearly a hundred of these for Nora’s Wedding and ended up using them throughout the entire wedding reception. More photos to follow.

Here’s my best attempt to document the how-to. You will need the following:

Pretty papers. We used a mix of scrapbook printed papers and some plain construction papers.
Paper glue
Glue gun
Cute buttons/jewels for the center

First, select the papers in the color scheme that you want. For this project, we used Purple, Pink, and Orange as the main colors and some other supplemental colors.

Cut the paper into long strips. The width of the strip is equal to the radius of the wheel so the wider the strip, the larger the wheel will be.

Start folding each strip using accordion fold…

We trimmed the edge of some strips with fancy-edge scissors so some of the wheels have pretty edges on them.

This is how the strip should look after the fold is done…

You will then need to glue 2-3 strips together to make a circular tube like this…

Then gather to top part and push it down and glue with the glue gun.

This part requires a lot of patience. You’ll have to hold it down until the glue is completely set.

It worked much better for us with 2 people doing this step together. We also found that it worked better to gathered the top, dropped in a bit of glue, then pushed it down into a flat wheel.