Coffee Filter Flowers

    My house looks a little like a cheap flower shop.  There are coffee filter flowers everywhere, all in beautiful rainbow colours. They are my latest obsession.  Between the kids and I there is hardly a bare spot in the house between our fairies and our coffee filter flowers.

    This craft is fun the whole way through, right from creating the beautiful rainbow colours to creating all of the different flowers.  It's hard to believe that the lowly coffee filter can create such pretty colours.  To begin with I was on the fence about using my coffee filters.  I mean those are important to my daily survival!  They cost money.  Then the rational part of my brain kicked in (thank goodness).  I don't use coffee filters any more since I received my glorious Keurig coffee maker.  When I make my coffee in the morning I feel like I should be hearing angel's sing.  The other thing that I reminded myself about (that dirty cheapskate in me) was that even if I did still use my coffee maker (which I don't since I began my love affair with my Keurig), I paid 99 cents for that package of coffee filters.  That's less than it would cost for a package of construction paper, so stop being such a cheap son of a gun.

    The process of dying the coffee filters is really fun (o.k. I admit it I am very childish).  I mixed my gel food colouring with water and put it into my little bowls.  I then placed the coffee filters into the little bowls.

    I marveled watching the filter wick up the dye.  Each batch was completely unique.  The colours all varied depending on how long I left them.

    When I took them out of the dye I placed them on a plate with paper towel on it.  I then put as many as I could fit on it to dry.  Where the filters touched, the dyes mixed creating a tie dye like finish.  They were beautiful, which is a really a funny thing to say about coffee filters.

    It was fun experimenting creating different flowers.  The easiest flowers were the poppy and the mum.  Here is how I created my mum...

    I folded my dried coffee filter in half and cut small strips along the pleated edge of the filter.  I then used the glue stick and covered the inside area with glue, and folded it in half.

Yes, that is a Barbie place-mat.  I didn't want to get glue on the table.

    I glued and folded it in half again.  

    The next step in my flower making project was to create a stem.  Lucky for me I had lots of thin wooden coffee stir sticks.  I cut a small strip of green tissue paper to fit the stick.  I then carefully used my glue stick and covered the surface of the tissue paper in glue.

    The stem is pretty easy.  I just rolled the coffee stick in the tissue paper, and voila a stem.

    Next I centered the coffee filter that I had folded in half and then half again.  I applied a layer of glue to the now quartered coffee filter, and wrapped it around the "stem" (coffee stir stick wrapped in tissue).

    I repeated this step, several times until I was happy with the fullness of my mum. 

     Do I think these coffee filters look like real flowers?  No, no they don't, but they were lots of fun to make.  I sat around the table with my girls, smiling, laughing and creating.  We all had fun.  I'm not really sure what we will do with all of these paper flowers, but that doesn't matter really.  What matters is that they were fun to make, and we spent time together.