My Funny Valentine: Marker Tie Dyed Heart Garland

We came across these cute tie dyed coffee filter hearts and wanted to give them a try -- we have a TON of coffee filters left over from our spray painting (and our coffee maker doesn't use filters.  and, who are we kidding, mom uses Starbucks, not our coffee maker).  I'm not quite at the scissors stage and Kane is learning, but not quite at the "cut a heart out of this" stage.  So instead we used our Do A Dot markers to "tie dye" the filters and then mom used her heart punch to cut out hearts after they dried.  We had a hard time pressing hard enough to get a good tie dyed effect.  To help, mom stacked several filters together and then soaked them in water. We then dotted the stack with our markers and the water helped spread the color out over the filter and down through the layers.  And you know we couldn't resist using our glitter pens on the top filter.  Mom then taped the hearts to some baker's twine and hung up the garland.  It turned out to stretch almost the entire length of our main room and we love that it's not just pink, red and purple (we've got plenty of other Valentine's crafts going with that color scheme, too!).

One More Cup of Coffee: Spray Painted Coffee Filters

Momma generally dislikes doing a lot of overly "cutesy" arts and craft projects, so she's stayed away from lots of the coffee filter ones floating around out there.  But we've done a few of them at school this year and she thought she'd give one a try.  And we used it as an opportunity to break out a new tool -- the spray bottle.  I should have known I was in for something good when momma starting draping the entire table in butcher paper, but I was still incredibly excited and surprised when she started filling up spray bottles with washable liquid watercolors.  I LOVED IT.  I was a painting machine.  I couldn't get enough filters, fast enough.  Cami wasn't able to use the spray bottle by herself, but she liked having mom help her use the bottle, shaking paint out of the bottle herself, and painting with a paintbrush.

I think our current plan is to periodically do this project (likely outside next time!), save up our painted filters, and use them for a party garland (like this or this).  But this was such a success (despite the household casualties, see below) that I think we're going to try also try some of these:

- coffee filter spray art with markers (which would avoid the spraying of paint everywhere)
- outdoor spray painting
- some printmaking

Oh -- even though I did a really good job of (mostly) keeping the paint aimed at the table and in the direction of the coffee filters, momma would like me to point out that the "washable" watercolors indeed come out of clothes and off of skin quite easily.  The same does not go for our bamboo wood floors and white walls, which were unfortunate and innocent victims of this project.  We think an arts studio should be at the top of everyone's holiday lists for us.