Sparkly Coffee Filter Christmas Trees

This is a fun and easy Christmas craft for young children. We’re using hand-dyed coffee filters and craft gems to make sparkly, miniature Christmas trees to hang on our big Christmas tree for the holidays.

We’ve dyed coffee filters for lots of projects in the past and the hooligans always love the process. It’s a great way for kids to learn about water absorption, a fun way to explore and experiment with colour and a great activity for strengthening fine motor skills.

You Will Need:

• white coffee filters
• liquid watercolours or food colouring
• small dish
• medicine dropper
• craft sticks
• brown paint
• paintbrush
• craft jewels and gems
• thread for hanging

Instructions:

1. Begin by colouring the coffee filters.

First off, you’ll want to protect your work surface to prevent any staining, especially if you’re using food colouring to dye your filters.

I also place our filters on a baking sheet or a plastic serving tray to contain any excess liquid.

Pour some liquid watercolours or food colouring into a small dish and add a few drops of water to slightly dilute.

Now, the children can use their medicine droppers to drip the coloured water all over their coffee filters. Kids of all ages love this process! Even the 8-year-olds that I was working with on this day were fascinated. 

To add some variation to the colour on the filters, you can drip a bit of undiluted colour onto the filters and have the children swish it around with a paintbrush. This will add nice, dark veins of colour to the coffee filters.

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2. Let your coffee filters dry and then fold them in thirds.

3. Assemble your trees! We used three coffee filters for each tree. We simply layered them on top of each other and glued them to craft sticks (that we’d painted brown while the coffee filters were drying).

4. Once we had our trees assembled, we glued lots of sparkly gems and jewels all over the front of them.

5. We finished by gluing a metallic thread to the top of each of our trees so we could hang them from our Christmas tree.