Coffee Filter Flowers from My Insanity

I am thrilled to be blogging here at Somewhat Simple today!  I was so excited to meet Steph at our Arizona Tour de Thrift!  She was so nice and down-to-earth!  Hopefully, this won't be the last time we collaborate.

Today, I am going to share a quick tutorial with you, on making my coffee filter flowers.

I used some like this in my daughter's first birthday party, and had requests for a tutorial then.  I said I would do one, but never got around to it...until now.  They are really quite easy to do.  My 9 year old was helping me make these for this tutorial.  If she can do it, so can you!

What you need:

* Coffee Filters (available in grocery stores, etc.)

* green floral tape (available in most craft stores, and even Walmart, I think)

*Bamboo skewers (we actually used chopsticks tonight)

OPTIONAL: 

Stamp pads

food coloring & water

Take a coffee filter and puncture a hole in the center with your skewer.

Gather the coffee filter up around the top of the skewer, twisting the bottom of the filter tightly around the stick to form a stem.

Use your floral tape to secure the bottom of the filter to the skewer.

(remember to pull and stretch the tape as you go)

Take a new coffee filter and begin the process again

Slide it up to meet the other filter and make a new layer of flower petals.

It is a good idea to scrunch the filter up a bit, then twist the bottom again...

...and secure with more floral tape.

Repeat at least once more (we used 4 filters in the flowers we made tonight).

Your flower will look something like this.  You can make sure the stick doesn't show (like it does here), or use the stick to add a contrasting center to the flower.

We taped the entire stick with the floral tape.

This is optional, but we used a couple of colors of stamp pads (These are from Stampin' Up) to ink the edges of the flowers.  You just lightly rub the ink pad along the edges of the flower. My daughter was pretty enthusiastic in her inking so these are pretty colorful.  

I also experimented with putting a little bit of water in a shallow dish and adding a drop or two of food coloring.

Then I just lightly dipped the edges of the filter into the water.  The paper absorbs the liquid and carries the color into the rest of the flower, giving this effect.

This flower is still a bit wet and droopy when I took the picture.  You can gently reshape the flowers and leave them up-side-down to dry, if you use this method.

You can quickly make lots of these for big fluffy bouquets.  You can also make some with out the sticks (the taping is a little more tricky.  Just turn the center of the filter into it's own stem, and tape the other layers on to that.

Thanks, Steph, for letting me hijack your blog for the day.  I hope you will come and check out more of my crazy ideas over on My Insanity.

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I love Kendra! We have been blogging friends for months now, and I had no idea she lived in AZ until I sat in front of her at the Blog event last month. It was an awesome surprise to meet her and we are already talking about a future project, so stay tuned! Thanks for the great tutorial Kendra!