Coffee Filter Roses

Found on Craftberry Bush
http://www.craftberrybush.com/2011/01/rose-tutorial-just-for-you.html

As promised, here is the rose tutorial.  I hope you find the instructions easy to follow.

You will find that the initial preparation takes a little bit of time, but I hope you'll agree that the end results are worth it.  I would love to see how your roses turn out.

This is the rose we will be making, let's get started...

Here is what you will need:

Coffee filters

Food colouring or dye (red and yellow)

Floral wire

Floral tape

Scissors

Paint brush

1. Dilute food colouring or dye in water (the richer the colour, the darker the rose).  In order to expedite the process, use a large container where you can place several coffee filters at the same time.
2. Place coffee filter in the coloured water.  The longer you leave the filter in the water, the richer the colour will be.  Continue this process and allow to dry.  If you are like me and don't like waiting, you can use a hair dryer to expedite the process.
3. In a small container, dilute yellow and red food colouring or dye to make orange; this will be used for the centre of the rose (you can skip this step and the next step, however,  I think that this is what makes the rose so realistic looking)
4.With a paint brush, gently add the orange/yellow colour to the edge of the filter.  The filter must be dry or the paint will run and mix with the pink. Once again, allow to dry.

Is this not the most beautiful bunch

of coffee filters you have ever seen?

5. Once the filter is dry, take the filter with the orange edge (not very noticeable in the picture, but you want it to be very gradual) and fold in half.
6. Fold that half in half.
7. Cut the bottom of the filter as shown
8. Open the filter and cut a slit on one side only as shown.

9. Take your floral wire (sorry, I forgot to buy some and so I used a pipe cleaner; it works well but it's not as sturdy as floral wire)
10. Start wrapping the coffee filter around the pipe cleaner
11. Continue wrapping until...
12. The entire filter is wrapped around the wire

13. With floral tape, tightly wrap bottom of rose as shown
14. In a similar way as steps 5 and 6, fold filter to form a triangle (I folded it 4 times)
15. (Optional) With your scissors, scallop the edges.  This does not have to be perfect.; nature is perfectly imperfect.
16. Open filter and repeat steps 9-13.  You will repeat steps 9-13 until you have the desired size. For this particular rose I used 4 filters in total.

17. Once you are satisfied with the size, wrap the filter one last time but this time...
18. Wrap the entire wire

19. It's difficult to tell from the pictures but the last row of  'petals'  looks like one continuous petal.  In order to give the rose a realistic look you will have to cut the filter in the shape of a petal..see fig. 20.
21. I tried to show you with an arrow how the cut would look (I apologize for the quality of the picture)
22. The rose is now done.  Now it's time to fluff it up and make it look real by adjusting the petals.  Use the method I showed you here (steps 6-7). 

.................Take a deep breath.................

And we are done!  As I mentioned before, the initial process of dying the filters takes some time, but once you have all those beautiful filters ready, you should be a master rose maker by your second rose! (fingers crossed for you)