Curls without curlers?

Its my senior christmas dance in about two weeks and I was wanting to have my hair down and curly/wavey since I usually tie it back. Trouble is I don't have curlers, rollers or anything designed for making curls and I need all the money I have for presents so can't afford to buy anything. My straighteners are too wide to be able to curl with them.

I do have hair pins though, and I read an article about using hair pins to create curls. I would wash my hair, roll the hair on my fingers, and pin it up. Then you are supposed to leave it to dry overnight but I am doing a coffee morning (it means I get out of school about an hour earlier) and so will not be able to havee it up then. I will have a couple of hours, so I was wondering if it would work if I washed, sparyed with blowdry spray, pinned, blow dryed and left it to cool. Then I would maybe put on some hairspray, left it down and spray with serum.
Would that work? And am I using the right products. And am I using them at the correct times? I could possibly borrow some mouse if thats better but I don't really know how to apply it properly.

My hair is like this:  

Only a bit less wavey and less nice. I will probably do a sideparting, so if it does go flat it'll still look decent. What stage should I put the parting in?

I'm going to have to do it myself so if you could keep things simple and maybe just assume I know very little about hairstyling and explain everything, unless it's already in this post, the chances are I don't know.

It worked. I took your advice and tried it out, and it mainly worked although it took ages. It was faster the second time I did it and looked a lot neater. It looked just as good as the curls with curlers or the ones done by hairdresses so I'm quite pleased with that. XD Lasted all night and just brushed out the next day to my normal hair.

I didn't use mouse though, since there wasn't any in the house.