Time for Tea & Crumpets

I am not a tea drinker and never have been, so when I decided to do some tea staining recently, I wanted to find some tea that was different than the Lipton tea bags I use for sun tea, for the family.  (Honestly it's been years).  I stood in the tea aisle, browsing the various boxes, smelling the various scents and feeling totally overwhelmed.  I finally settled on a Celestial Seasonings, Lemon Zinger, because I simply love the smell of lemon. So, I proceeded to heat a pan of water, threw in all the tea bags and waited for the whole thing to get hot.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a blood red color instead of the usual sepia color of what I thought all tea looked like.  I poured the tea into a glass jar to save it for later and proceeded to lay the bags on watercolor paper to let them dry and stain the paper at the same time.  Another beautiful surprise!  The paper stains were lavender with a hint of green!  Crazy!

The dried tea bags are a cool pinkish red color and will be used in some collage.

The red tea is being used to over-dye some shibori fabrics I did this past summer and I am leaving them to soak overnight to let the tea process the fabrics, as much as possible.  It's not easy to be patient!

These papers will be used in some art journals later, but these photos will be used in my digital art to create some awesome backgrounds.  Combined with some other photography of local landscapes, the results should be interesting.  Never really know what you will get, unless we try.

I found myself in the tea aisle again today, sort of swaying back and forth until I picked up the smell of peppermint!  I found some green tea too, so hopefully that will be a good tea for staining as well. I also picked up something that I've never seen before, some Lipton tea that is Southern Sweet Tea for the hubby.  Hope he likes it!