Coffee filter leaf garland
These coffee filter leaves are so beautiful and will help to hold on to the warm glow of autumn that little bit longer! They’re really easy to make and you can either stick them to your windows with a little bit of tape or thread them to make an autumn leaf garland like we did.
What you will need:
White round coffee filters
Leaves or leaf templates (optional)
Pencil
Scissors
Liquid watercolour paint
Droppers or paintbrushes
Yarn
Yarn needle
What you need to do:
1. First you need to draw some different leaf outlines on your coffee filters. I found some leaf templates online which I downloaded, resized to fit onto our coffee filters, and printed them. We then traced over the templates on the coffee filters. We also drew around some leaves that we had collected earlier that day. Of course, you can also draw the leaves freehand!
2. You can then cut out your leaf shapes - we cut through 4 coffee filters at a time.
3. Next is the fun bit! We used a dropper to apply red, orange and yellow liquid watercolour paints to the leaves. You can use a paintbrush if you prefer or if you don’t have a dropper. The colours swirled together and made really beautiful patterns. The trick here is not to apply too much of the paint as the colours will blend together as they dry and you’ll have less variation in your leaves. We discovered this rather late on!
4. Leave your painted leaves to dry. It is best to not place them on an absorbent surface as this will absorb the moisture and the leaves won’t be so vibrant.
5. When the leaves are dry, you can stick them to your windows with some sticky tape ( a circle of tape with the sticky side out works well). We decided to make a garland by threading the leaves on to some lovely colourful yarn and hung it up in our window. I found it helped to make the initial holes for the yarn with a pin before using a blunt yarn needle to thread the yarn through.
I love the way the leaves glow when the sun shines through them but even when the sun isn’t shining, the colourful leaves still add a lovely warmth to our living room!
Author: Denise Hope, home educating mum of two boys