Dyed coffee filters are a really fun addition to doing crafts with kids. Coffee filters can be used for 3-D projects, paintings, collages, and more! You can make these beautiful jellyfish for a mobile or add them to a painting of clouds. Wherever your kiddos creativity takes them, these dyed coffee filters can add a lot of interest and fun. And they are super simple and inexpensive to make!
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What you need:
- Coffee filters
- Paint or food coloring
- Bowls (a separate one for each color)
- Paper Towels
How to Dye Coffee filters for crafts with kids:
First, make your Dye.
You can use paint or food coloring to make your dye. We used food coloring in these examples.
Add water and dye to a bowl and mix until the color looks nice and saturated. I would suggest making the color more saturated than you think it should. The coffee filters don’t absorb 100% of the color, so the more dye to water ratio the better!
Next, Add the coffee filters to the dye.
We added several coffee filters to each bowl to make the best use of the dye and space. Make sure they are completely submerged unless you want the edges to be left undyed.
Let the Coffee filters sit in the water until they are saturated with the dye.
The longer they sit in the water, the darker they will become. You can pick up the edges every once and a while and check on the color, remembering that they darken just slightly when dry. We let ours sit for about an hour and they were very pale in color.
Since it does take a little longer for coffee filters to soak up the dye, this is a great 2-day project. Add the filters to the dye the first day and then let them sit in the water till the next day.
When the filters are your desired color, remove them from the dye and blot them dry.
We used paper towels to remove excess water from each filter. Once the filters were not dripping, we set them out to dry completely on newspaper.
The coffee filters dried relatively quickly and we were able to use them in a project the same day we made them, however, if you want to do this, make sure you allow plenty of time for them to dry just in case.
When they were all dry we used them to make our Jellyfish Mobile! The extras we stored for another day and another project.
What are you going to make with your dyed coffee filters? Let us know in the comments below!
