DIY _ Simple Realistic Hydrangeas - Coffee Filter Flowers

My all-time favorite flower is the hydrangea. I just love it. I have quite a few bushes in my garden, and if I could, I would put hydrangeas in every room in my home. But silk hydrangeas are pretty expensive. One stem could cost you about eight dollars each. And I wanted to get a realistic display like this for my kitchen table, but wow, look at this, 108 dollars. But not to worry, I'll show you how you can make your own beautiful and very realistic hydrangea display using what you already have in your home. Now last week I showed you how to make these flower balls and realistic roses using coffee filters, and I was so excited about how that turned out that I used the same method to make my favorite flower, the hydrangea. So here's my quick method of making this bushy flower made up of many tiny little petals. To make these, I'm using coffee filters and food coloring. Now I'm going to show you a couple of different variations on this, but the first one is a little more detail. You want to start by putting a little bit of water, just enough water to cover your coffee filters in a bowl, and then I'm going to mix some food coloring in. I'm going to mix a natural green by adding green and yellow and a tiny bit of red. Now I'm going to dip a stack of coffee filter sheets in here, but you're going to need about eight sheets per flower. Let those soak for a few minutes, and then you're going to take those out and squeeze them a little bit to get rid of the excess water, and then we're going to put those on a cookie sheet to put in the oven. I'm putting them in the oven to help them dry faster, but the smaller the stack, the quicker they dry, so I'm going to divide these in half. So you want to let those bake in the oven for about a half an hour at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and when they come out of the oven, you'll have a stack of sheets that look like this. Now I dyed these a light green just so that I have a base color of a light green inside the hydrangea flower. These are a little bit yellow, but next time I'll add a little more green. So I'm going to take two sheets and fold them in half, then I'm going to fold them in half again, and as I'm folding them, I'm going to cut the sides, not all the way down to the end. I want to have a little bit left to twist at the end, but I'm going to cut the sides as I fold them. I'm going to fold it again, and this will help keep the flowers from linking together because I'm going to cut some shapes out of this fold. So I'm going to fold this one more time and then cut the side. Now I'm going to draw a little flower on the face of this made up of four little hydrangea petals. So it doesn't have to be perfect, just petal shapes, and then I'm going to draw a thick stem. I want the stem to go out to the edge as it goes down, something like that. Now I'm going to take some scissors and cut around the shape of the flower using this drawing as a guide, and like I said, it doesn't have to be perfect. And then you'll have something that looks like this, and then you're going to open that up until the sheets are halfway folded, and you have something that looks like paper dolls. Now I'm going to make four of these, so I'll have eight sheets that are cut, and I'm going to lie this down on something that I can paint on, and I'm going to use my food coloring to paint the petals. So let's make some blue hydrangeas. I'm going to start with a bowl. You can mix the food coloring in, and paintbrush, and some water. So I'm going to put a little bit of blue food coloring in the bowl, then use a really diluted brush and dip it in a little bit of the blue food coloring, and then dab that onto the ends of the petals. Now that came out a little too dark, so I'm going to start by putting very diluted water on the petals first, and then dab darker blue on the ends of the edges of the petals. Now I'm going to turn that over to make sure I got enough blue on both sides. So I'm just going to dab this side with blue also, just to make sure the blue dye bleeds through and gets into all the petals. So I did this process four times with two sheets each, so I have a total of eight sheets, and I think I'm going to put a little dot in the center of each flower, just to see if that makes a difference in making it more realistic. Now I'm also going to make a green and a purple. Now they only have purple in the neon food coloring, and maybe because of that I have this blue aftermath on the paper, but we'll see how that turns out. I also want to make a few big leaves for my hydrangea plant, so I'm going to take four sheets and fold that in half, and then I'm just going to try to draw two big leaf shapes onto the paper. I'm going to cut those out, and if you want you can cut little notches on the edges to make them more realistic, but that's not necessary. Now I'm going to paint my leaves a dark green by mixing the food color undiluted with green, yellow, and red until I get a nice natural green color. You might need to paint each leaf or dip each leaf in one at a time to get a good amount of color on both sides. So now I have all my leaves on the pan to put in the oven, and I'm putting all my flower pieces on a pan on a cookie sheet. And you can stack all the light colors together, just don't let them overlap different colors, because they'll bleed together. And bake those in the oven at 300 degrees for half an hour to an hour, and when they come out they'll look like this. So now I'm going to gently open them up and pull them apart, and I am going to rotate the petals. And some of these sheets are darker than others, so I'm going to alternate the dark and light sheets. And again I'm rotating each sheet as I lay them down so that none of the petals line up. So now I have eight sheets and I'm going to fold them all in half. Then from the bottom I'm just going to roll them around like a cone shape and very loosely. And I'm going to put a little hot glue on the edge to close that up. And then I'm just going to scrunch it up to wrinkle up the petals and then fluff it out. And I'm going to do the same with the green and the blue. And the more loosely you roll your cone shape, the bigger the flower will be. So now I'm going to take my dried leaves and I'm going to give them some veins by folding them. I'm going to fold it in half and then I'm going to fold it like an accordion shape at an angle upward to give it some veins. And when I open it up I have a very realistic hydrangea leaf but made from coffee filters. So now I'm going to give my flower some stems and leaves. For the stems I'm using a soft wire tie that I got from the hardware store. I'm just going to cut a hole at the bottom of the flower and stick a pencil through it to open up the hole. And then I'm going to put my wire through the hole. Then put a little scotch tape around that to hold the stem and the flower together. Next I'm using floral tape to make the stem dark green. And the floral tape is not sticky it's tacky so you have to pull it tight as you roll it around so that it sticks onto itself. And finally I'm going to use a little piece of scotch tape to tape a couple of leaves and then roll some floral tape around that to hide the scotch tape. And now I have a few beautiful homemade hydrangea flower stems that I think may even fool the birds and the bees in my garden. Can you tell which ones are real? Okay here's a little quicker version of the same flower. Instead of dyeing the filters first I'm going to just fold the plain white filters and draw the flowers and cut them the shapes out like I did with the other ones. And then I'm going to fold them up into the shape of the flower. I'm also using some natural color coffee filters. I want to make four white ones and two with the natural color. I'm going to make different shades of green. So I'm going to take two big bowls and I'm going to fill up put a little water in one bowl put green and yellow and red and make a light shade of green natural green. And in the other bowl I'm going to make a dark green with a tiny bit of water and lots of green and yellow and red to make a dark natural green color. So I'm going to take the white flower that I made and I'm going to lightly dip it in all around on into the light green color. And then I'm just going to dip the tips into the dark green. I'm going to place those on the cookie sheet. I'm going to try the natural brown coffee filter flowers. See how that turns out. Those should be a little bit darker and more brown. I'm going to also try dipping the tips into the dark dye first and then dip in the flower into the light green. And you can dilute each bowl with more water or add more green or more yellow to get different shades in different variations. And after drying these in the oven they come out really realistic. And this is a quicker version of the same flower without having to paint the individual petals. So with these I'm going to do what I always wanted to do. I'm going to put a floral foam in the bottom of this gravy bowl and I'm going to make me a nice floral display for my kitchen table. And since you won't see the stems for these I'm twisting up some thin floral wire from Dollar Tree and adding some leaves and I'm going to stick these into the foam. Now I have a hundred dollar display for my table and since I had everything here that I needed it cost me nothing to make. And looks like pretty soon I will have hydrangeas in every room of my home. Follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat at Your House A Home and Your House A Home TV for daily home food and gardening tips.