Stage one of wedding craft

Well I'm really not sure if I've mentioned it before but I am actually engaged, have been for 5 years now, we've done it a bit backwards and had the children first but we're now finally starting to plan our wedding..our extreme budget wedding I should probably add.
Like millions of other brides to be I've been scouring pinterest pinning endless ideas I'll never actually do but one I have attempted is the coffee filter roses that kept popping up.

I used this tutorial (which has the link to the free template) and well... to be honest mine have turned out a bit raggedy and ENORMOUS. The photo above is after one dip in red food colouring which has given the ends a nice pink tint but the rest of the petals have gone a dirty white...not exactly what I had in mind!
I'm persevering with it (well I have a packet of coffee filters, I may as well use them all! I think the main problem is the are so big, so next batch will have the last 2 layers of petals left off, we'll see how that looks..then of course theres the issues with the colouring. I might attempt a tea dip but I'm a bit worried that will just look like...well a used coffee filter lol

Heres some more pictures of my attempts anyway, the latest 3 havent been dyed yet.

And one final photo which is by far the best, I think I might end up just carrying my dd in front of me like a bouquet...