My future-mother-in-law works for a coffee company and is constantly giving us giant boxes of coffee filters. So I'm putting them to good use by pairing them with wiffle balls and making coffee filter puffs as wedding decor.
What you will need:
- Lots of coffee filters. Each puff requires about 50 individual filters.
- Wiffle softballs (or wiffle baseballs for smaller puffs). I got mine in bulk at a sporting goods store. They come in white and bright yellow, and I think the bright yellow makes for jaunty centers to the puffs. Each wiffle ball = 1 finished puff.
- Thin ribbon, twine or string.
- Glue gun with lots of glue sticks
- Optional: craft or watercolor paint and water.
Instructions:
Step 1: (If you want white puffs, skip this.)
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If you want colored puffs, dilute your paint. Like, dilute it a lot. For bright colored edges on the puffs, brush the color on the edges of a stack of filters. For a full wash, like the pink one in my photo, put the diluted paint in a large pan and just dunk the filters in, ruffled side down, whole stacks at a time. I've found that water color works much better for a wash of color, and craft paint makes bolder edging colors.
Step 1(b):
WAIT. The dyed filters take forever to dry, but don't give in to impatience and try to work with them while they're still damp. You'll end up with sad floppy balls and not happy crisp puffs. The full-wash dyed ones may need some support while they dry to maintain their ridges — I put mine in mixing bowls to hold them up while they dried.
Step 2:
Tie a loop of ribbon through each wiffle ball, thusly:
Step 3:
If you're making multiple puffs, put on some Netflix or an audio book and settle in, because this is the boring part. Take two coffee filters at a time and make them into cone-shaped twists:
You'll end up with a giant stack of twists, which will startle your betrothed and delight your pets.
Step 4:
Put a circle of hot glue around a wiffle-hole (that sounds way dirty, but don't giggle. Giggling may cause you to lose focus and glue your finger to the wiffle-hole). Insert a filter twist; gently screw it in as far as it will go.
Then secure it with a couple additional dabs of glue.
Repeat Step 4 until you have filled all the wiffle-holes. Gently pull apart the coffee filters to cover any gaps, and you're done! The finished puff will be 8-10 inches across.
