Coffee Filter Flowers and Handmade Cards

Cassie's last day of Preschool was this past week and I wanted to give her teachers something nice.  I thought about just buying something, but thought it would be much more meaningful to create some gifts and plus we had the materials on hand!  We decided to make Coffee Filter Flowers and handmade cards!
You could also make the flowers with colorful tissue paper too, but the coffee filters and liquid water colors were so much more fun! Here is a vase of some of our finished flowers!

All you will need for the flowers are:

Coffee FIlters

Liquid Watercolors or Food Colors

eye droppers

pipe cleaners

scissors

First, we covered the table with layers of newspaper so the food color or liquid water colors wouldn't soak through. I put some liquid water colors into a muffin tin, spread some coffee filters out, put eye droppers out, and Cassie was good to go! Here you can see Cassie dropping the color onto the coffee filters.

At one point Cassie was using two eye droppers at a time!  If you have never used eye droppers with your children make sure you do because it was so fun!

 As you can see Cassie is full of joy and quite excited with this endeavor!  She wanted to keep making more and more! We ended up making a whole vase full after giving them to her teachers!

After making the dyed coffee filters, we had to let them dry!!! When they were dry we began to construct the flowers! Cassie has become quite good at following directions....I've seen so much growth from a year ago!  The first step is to fold the coffee filter in half-----semi-circle---1/2. Math is definitely involved here!

Then fold the semi-circle into a 1/4 of circle.  After Cassie watched me do one she understood right away!!! Good Girl!!! So proud! Having been an Elementary Art Teacher I've had much older children who could not do this!!!

Then twist the folded 1/4 circle at the non-curved corner. A little tricky!

I wrapped one end of the pipe cleaner to the twisted end! Cassie did try but she kept twisting it off! We also used scissors to create petals....C loved this part! Then you can flare out the folded filter to make more of a flower shape and to open it up.

Here are the flowers we made for her teachers!!! I Love the colors!

After finishing the flowers, Cassie created some wonderful cards that she designed with flowers! They were so NICE! They went very well with the Coffee Filter Flowers!

Here are the flowers and card for Mrs. C. !!!!

Here are the flowers and card for Mrs. P. !!!!

Breathtaking! I could look at them all day!!!!

INSPIRATION:

***Click here for some Coffee Filter Flowers made with water based markers from  MOUNT PROSPECT LIBRARY !

***Click here for some Coffee Filter Flowers from TinkerLab made by layering the filters and accordion folding them!

WOULD YOU LIKE RECEIVING THESE FLOWERS AND CARDS AS A GIFT???

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