Rainbow spinners

Life has been a little crazy of late and my two boys have been really poorly so sorry about the quiet few weeks! I’m hoping the spring weather will bring them a better run of health!

I’ve been making some rainbow spinners to cheer us all up. They were inspired by an origami spinner I found over at arvindguptatoys.com, which is a truly amazing site (you’ll be hooked), and this really clever flip book created by Japanese art director Masashi Kawamura (film here).

My rainbow spinner is made from black paper and has little rainbow strips stuck to each spoke.

Once you have made the little spinning thing you thread some cotton/fishing wire through the middle, hold it at either end and then blow.

It’s very cool and you can make rainbows – yippee!!
(This is very hard to capture on camera. If you can actually make sense of all the knobs and twiddly bits on a camera I reckon you could take some pretty amazing shots of the ‘rainbow effect’. The photo below is my best effort!)

I also made a different spinner with rainbow coloured spokes. The theory is that when this one spins really fast you see light reflected from all its colors, but your brain cannot separate them. So you see a mixture of all colors, which is white (explanation taken from here).

I took some snaps of it whizzing round. Again, I think the shutter speed(?) was too fast to capture the grey effect but it looks very pretty all the same!

You can download a template here. The pdf includes the ‘spoke’ template (suitable for both spinners) and the rainbow strips for the black spinner. I’ve also written instructions on the pdf…if you need more help assembling your spinners then give me a yell and I’ll write a proper how-to!