Easy Watercolor Coffee Filter Snowflakes for Kids

In my girls’ bedroom we have large sliding glass doors that lead out onto our back deck. This is wonderful in the summer as it provides them with easy in and out access to play in our fully fenced backyard. In the winter the large windows provide lots of natural light and a view of our winter wonderland. The girls and I love to decorate these large windows with various seasonal suncatchers like our Beaded Snowflakes. A few weeks ago, Malia and I decided it was time for some new window decor and made beautiful, yet very easy, coffee filter snowflakes.

What You Need:
White, round coffee filters
Scissors
Washable markers
Spray bottle filled with water

Making Coffee Filter Snowflakes
One of the great things about using coffee filters to make snowflakes is that they are already circles! No more tracing and cutting out circles (that are never quite right). The other grear thing about coffee filters is that they act very much like watercolor paper, as they are designed to get wet, yet dry quickly. We bought a very large package at the dollar store, making it very budget friendly substitute for watercolor paper.

To get started we colored our coffee filters with washable markers (we used Crayola brand). We tried to cover as much of the coffee filter as possible with a variety of colors.

As you can see Malia drew a cat on her coffee filter. I told her when we sprayed the pciture with water her cat would melt. She was ok with that, infact ,she thought the idea of melting her cat with water was pretty hilarious! Four year olds have a interesting sense of humour sometimes 😉

Next came Malia’s favourite part, spraying the coffee filters with water. We sprayed the coffee filters until they were quite saturated with water and the colors bleed and mixed together. Malia would have been happily spray the colorful coffee filters for hours. Something for me to remember for summer afternoon outdoor activity.

When you are finished spraying you will need to let your coffee filters dry. We hung ours up using clothing pins and string. If you hang yours up to dry I recommend putting an old towel underneath to catch any colorful drips.

It took our coffee filters about 15 minutes to dry. If you are not patient enough to wait you could also use a blow dryer to cut your drying time down to less than a minute.

Once our coffee filters were dry they looked like this:

Now we were ready to turn our colorful coffee filters into snowflakes. We folded the coffee filter in half three or four times. This left us with a very narrow “piece of pie” shape. From here cut different shapes out along each side. Unfold to discover what design your cuts created!

If your little one is still developing their scissor skills, like Malia (age 4), it may prove too difficult for them to hold the folded coffee filter and cut. To prevent feelings of frustration help your child by securly holding the coffee filter while they do the cutting, like I did with Malia.

Malia and I loved how our snowflakes turned out! Just like real snowflakes each of our coffee filter snowflakes turned out unique and beautiful. The watercolors add a nice pop of color to our winter windows. Malia spent the hour after we finished playing with her dolls under the window in her “fairy snowstorm”.