Categories: Crafts & Hobbies

Crafts for Kids – Coffee Filter Flowers

If your kids like crafting, they will love this easy craft project to make coffee filter flowers. Making coffee filter flowers is a very fun project because your kids get to watch their simple scribbles transform into the beautiful colors and designs that will become the flower.

Click here to see a sample of a before photo of this flower and click here to see what that simple design turned into. Your kids do not have to draw just simple lines. Let them draw whatever design they want. The fun part of this project is watching to see what the final outcome will be.

To make coffee filter flowers, all you need are some white coffee filters, washable watercolor markers, a spray bottle filled with water, and anything you feel lie using for a flower stem like floral wire or green pipe cleaners. You will also need a non porous work space like a cookie sheet or glass plates or even wax paper for when you spray the coffee filters.

Start by flattening out coffee filters on any surface (any surface is fine for this step, however you may want to protect your space with newspaper). Then let your children color any type of designs they want on the coffee filters. They must use washable watercolor markers. Permanent markers like Sharpies will not work. Encourage the kids to color a variety of designs using lots of different color combinations.

After the coffee filters are all colored, put each coffee filter on a glass plate or a cookie sheet or on a table covered in wax paper. You can use any non porous surface. You can even lay the coffee filters on the bottom of your bath tub. You just can’t use newspaper or paper plates as your work surface because a porous surface will absorb the design on the coffee filter and will eat up all the color. So use a surface that does not absorb water.

When you have your coffee filters laid out, squirt each one 3 or 4 times so the coffee filter is nice and damp. You do not want to drench the coffee filters because they will take too long to dry. Just spray them until they are moist and then wait. In about 5 minutes you will see a brand new design. If after 5 minutes you see that the lines of the design did not blend enough, you can spray the flowers a bit more. If you let the kids do this step, just watch that they do not over wet the coffee filters. It’s best to just squirt once and watch to see if that was enough. If it’s not, the flower can be sprayed more in a few minutes.

Now you have to let the coffee filters dry. This can take up to an hour or even more if the coffee filters were overly saturated. You can speed up the drying process by moving the coffee filters off the wet surface after they have blended and moving them to a dry non porous surface. If you have a space where the sun is hitting a table or the floor, you can lay out a cheap shower liner and lay all the coffee filters in the sun to dry. If you are in a super hurry, you can speed up the drying process with a hair dryer (with adult supervision only).

When the coffee filters are dry, take one and poke a green pipe cleaner or some floral wire through the center. Then roll about an inch of the pipe cleaner into a ball at the center of the coffee filter so the coffee filter will not fall off the wire. You can click here to see a photo of this step.