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!!