Friday, April 24, 2009

Button Caterpillars and Coffee Filter Butterflies

All you need for this fun, easy craft is your button collection and pipe cleaners.
I first saw this button caterpillar at this site.
I had recently bought bags of bright colored buttons. They came with about 100 buttons per bag in many wonderful colors.
We used 1/2 a pipe cleaner for each caterpillar. I secured the first button onto the pipecleaner tightly with pliers.
Everyone had an easy time stringing the buttons onto the pipecleaners. If you do not fill the pipe cleaner up with buttons, but leave a little extra space, it is easier to bend the caterpillars into cute positions. I finished them by using pliers to bend the end of the pipecleaner back into the last button.
Add some wiggle eyes and you have a very cute caterpillar.
Our caterpillar family.
Before I continue with our butterfly craft, I need to share with you how pleased I am with this Color Splash! Liquid Watercolor. I had no experience with liquid watercolor and I purchased the 8 oz. size bottles. (I now realize that these may last us the rest of our lives!) You dilute the color 3 parts water to 1 part paint. For our project I used about 1 Tbls of color to 3 Tbls water. This gave us enough paint for all our painting and some left over for mixing and painting on paper. The colors are so bright, I will never buy the cheap watercolor paint in the box again.
We began our butterflies using paint, droppers, and coffee filters.
We have never used coffe filters for art. We will definitely be using these more often.

Fold the coffee filter like you would to make snow flakes. We then used the dropper to carefully add watercolor to the coffee filter. Remember, the fun thing about the coffee filter is that the colors disperse quickly.
We made many different designs.
Unfold, and we had gorgeous results.

Of course, we needed to wait for this to dry before continuing with our butterflies, but I was surprised that they were completely dry within an hour.
We enjoyed seeing the color "wick" up the coffee filter.
We all could have kept on making coffee filter art--we just need more projects to use the finished products with.
Kim and Luke just dripped the color onto the filter.
A lovely pile of painted filters.
Needed for butterflies:
painted coffee filters
clothes pins
pipe cleaners
wiggle eyes
Fold the coffee filter accordian style:
clip the clothes pin onto the center of the filter:
make antenna out of pipe cleaners, clip these on the clothes pin:
glue on wiggle eyes:
open out the wings
Enjoy!!
We are going to hang our butterflies from the ceiling and enjoy---our caterpillars are destined to crawl in some of our plants.
Check out all this week's We Made It: Friday Showcase!!

11 comments:

Christy Killoran said...

I love this. I recently bought a package of coffee filters at the dollar store and we have a Keurig coffee maker so no need for coffee filters, except for art projects. We will definitely try these. Thanks for sharing.

jennwa said...

What fun ideas. I love those button caterpillars, too cute.

Thanks for sharing such cute ideas.

Rhonda said...

Great spring projects! Everything is so colorful and cute!

Jennifer James said...

I love the catepillars! We just went and saw a butterfly release and got some live catepillars. The button craft will go along perfectly with our little unit study! Thanks for sharing all your cute crafts!

Ticia said...

Coffe filter flowers. I remember making several Mother's Day presents out of these.

Nicki said...

Cool idea! We made the butterflies last summer, but yours turned out much better! When we do butterflies again in the summer, I'll try it your way, plus add the button caterpillars!

Ladybug Mommy Maria said...

Very, very cute!

I really like those button caterpillars!

Well done!

Debra said...

Oh my goodness, I have never seen those caterpillar crafts before! I am definitely bookmarking this for future reference when my little one is a tad bit older. Thanks so much.....great idea....and good use for all my extra buttons.

Christie said...

These caterpillars are so stinkin' cute. I love them!

viagra no prescription said...

Great post. I think one of the basic things that we should know know is that we must always make sure that you are safe in every transactions you wanted to indulge with.

Unknown said...

Thanks for some other fantastic post. The place else may just anybody get that type of info in such an ideal means of writing? I have a presentation subsequent week, and I am at the look for such information.AGS Filtration Pvt. Ltd is a Native Indian organization of Worldwide reputation in the field of multiple demand and program Filtration. Liquid Filters.