I stayed home sick today and I hate wasting my time in bed, so I decided to mildly craft out. I really love tissue paper flowers but I don’t like spending a ton of time cutting out paper. I found this neat tutorial last year for making coffee filter flowers and I thought I’d take it a step further. I dyed the coffee filters with food coloring and water, let them air dry, and then made them with pipe cleaners as the stem. By using coffee filters I didn’t have to cut the paper to shape. I just shaped the petals, which is far quicker. They really turned out splendidly, don’t you think?
Materials:
White coffee filters
Red food coloring
Liquid medicine syringe or eye dropper
Scissors
Pipe cleaners
Floral tape
Floral wire
Directions:
You’ll be using 12 filters per flower. Fill a small cup with water and about 7 drops of food coloring. Place a few filters at a time onto a plate. With the syringe or eye dropper randomly drop the water all over the filters. Flip them over and do the other side. It’s up to you how much white you want to leave. Hang dry them. Or I guess you could use a hair dryer, but I don’t own one.
When filters are dry, take six at a time and fold them in half three times and cut out a heart shape to make the petals. I cut more off of one set of six. These will be the inside petals.
Rough up the edges of the petals with your scissors. Cut a teeny tiny bit off the point of the filters to create a small hole in each filter.
Repeat with second set of six filters, but don’t cut off as much. These will be your outer petals.
Take your pipe cleaner and create a little nub at one end. Take one sheet of your smaller filter and thread it up to the nub. Wrap the bottom of the filter all around the nub to cover it and secure with floral tape. This way you won’t be able to see the center of the flower.
Thread the next filter onto the pipe cleaner and scrunch it around the nub. Repeat with one filter at a time till you’ve put on all the small filters.
Scrunch around the base of the flower and wrap with floral tape. You’ll now have a small flower and you could call it a day, but I want a huge peony.
Take one larger filter and thread it on the pipe cleaner, but don’t shove it all the way up. Give it a little space so the outer petals are just a little longer than the inner petals. Repeat with the remaining filters. Scrunch up around the base of the flower and secure with floral tape.
Cut a 6-inch piece of floral wire and fold it in half, or just use another pipe cleaner. Stick it to the main stem and continue wrapping with floral tape. This stabilizes the stem. Keep wrapping all the way to the bottom.
Break tape and wrap the bottom of the stem. Ta-da!
These flowers look cheery on a window sill year-round. Peony season is on the way, but I just couldn’t wait. These will definitely do in the meantime.
Natasha was born and raised in Anchorage. She has always had a passion for making useful things, whether they are knit, crocheted, sewn or randomly glued and assembled. She received her bachelor’s degree in French and journalism from the University of Alaska Anchorage and spent six fulfilling years working at Skinny Raven Sports. She is currently Program Associate at Spirit of Youth and also does voice over work around town. If you're awake at 3 a.m. and tune into KLEF 98.1 you might hear Natasha delivering public service announcements. She lives in Anchorage with her husband, Stephen, and young son, Jack.
