Craft Night - Peonies

This past Tuesday, Linda, Jamie and I had another weekly craft night.  This time we decided to make peonies out of coffee filters.  I love this because I love flowers and the look of flowers, but they can get expensive if you are purchasing fresh ones weekly, and a nice arrangement of fake ones can also be pricey.  So we brought our coffee filters, scissors, tape, and green floral wire.  I'm guessing any wire would work, you can probably cut up an old wire hanger and use that if you want.  So here is the step by step of what we did.  Hope this tutorial helps!

You'll start out with 10 coffee filters.  You can either use different size filters (smaller diameter for the inside of the flower, and larger for the outside).  Or you can just cut a few of the ones you have down a little, that way you don't have to buy two different size filters (which is what we did).

First you fold the filter 4 times.  You can do this with two or three filters at a time to make the process go faster.  I did 2 at a time.  3 seemed to be a little too thick by the 4th fold.

First Fold

Second fold

Third fold

Fourth fold

The fourth fold is where you could cut off a strip at the top of the filter to make it smaller for the inside of the flower.  Optional, but not necessary :)

Then we cut the corner at a diagonal.  Make sure you cut the corner that is on the creased side, not the open side.

Then, open the filter back up one fold and cut the two outside corners to make it look like a heart.  The cut you made in the previous step should have made a V shape in the middle of the heart.

Now open the filter all the way up and you should have a filter with scalloped edges.  Repeat these steps with the rest of the 10 filters.

Once you've finished all of the filters, take your wire, and make a loop at the top almost like a candy cane.

Then take your first filter, poke the bottom of the wire through the middle of the filter, slide it all the way up to the loop, and gather the bottom of the filter around the loop.  The filter will close up a lot but that's good.  This is the inside of your flower and you'll want it to cover the wire.

Then to secure that first layer, tape the twisted bottom portion to the wire.  We tried using floral tape, but found that clear scotch tape worked better.  So, it's up to you.

Then just repeat with the remaining 9 layers.  I only put tape on after the first layer, 5th layer, and last layer.   And it should look like this when you're done!

There are lots of things you can do with these.  I've seen them dipped in water colors, food coloring or some other type of ink.  I sprayed one of mine with some spray adhesive and dipped the tips in glitter.

 Hope you all have some fun with these!  They are a great way to add some floral accents around your home or even office that will last! And you can color them for every season :) .  Happy crafting!