Egg Carton Roses

Homemade Mamas love any craft that reuses would be trash
- we have never seen trash look so pretty!.
We thought the possibilities would be endless for these pretty egg carton roses found on about.com, especially with Valentine's Day just around the corner. They would look lovely topping a package, on a wreath, cards or embellishing other crafts. This would be a great craft to do with older children.

What you need:

• cardboard egg carton
• bowl of water
• food coloring
• scissors

Cut two cups from your egg carton (you will need two cups for each rose you want to make.
The edges of the cups can be slightly scalloped for a more realistic rose. Then soak the cups in water for about 5 minutes.

Cut a slit in one of the cups and open up the cup.
Now roll up the cup and pinch the bottom together to make the center of the rose.Put the center into the other cup and pinch the bottoms together to shape the outer petals of your rose.

It took us a little experamenting to figure out how to color the roses. The directions we found said to drop food coloring onto the rose. We found dropping food coloring and dribbling water on top gave us colors we liked. Painting the roses with water colors might work well too.
***this would be a great time to wear latex gloves!!***

We decided to make leaves to go with our blooms. We cut leaf shapes from the top of the egg carton.

Next we folded them in half and pinched the ends together and colored them with green food coloring.

Let the roses dry. We were too impatient to let them air dry so we put them in the oven at 175 degrees for several hours. A couple of the roses needed a drop of glue between the two egg cartons. Now your roses are ready!