Tea Bags: “Pretty” Colors
Lately, I’ve seen several mixed media projects using tea bag papers as materials. This was intriguing to me, so I decided to give it a try. And since I’m a big iced tea drinker, it was no problem to start saving my tea bags.
After letting the bags dry, usually 2 at a time, I pulled them apart and got these great papers.
Click any image for a larger view
I know you’re supposed to clean all the grounds off, but I found them to be some of the most interesting parts. So, I gave the papers a coating of diluted gel medium, front and back, and decided to use them with a few grounds attached.
After generating quite a collection of rather uniform tea bag papers, I began to wonder about the possibility of achieving different colors with different types of tea. So, I bought a sampler box of fruity teas and boiled them up. Rather impatient at this point, I dumped all 12 of them into the same bowl to dry. As they did so, I was delighted to see various colors of reds, browns, and orange-reds. And even some blue! I wish I had taken a picture so I could show you how lovely this combination of colors was.
Then, I examined them more carefully, and discovered a surprise. The blue parts were fuzzy! I had succeeded in growing an excellent crop of mold! Darn it. Most of the tea papers were unusable, but I did manage to save a few colorful scraps.
I still had no idea what I’d do with these, but then along came a mixed media book challenge (that I initiated,) and I began to consider using these.
In the next post, I’ll show you my plans and progress.
Ellen Lindner
P.S. See how Judy Coates Perez created a quilt background with used tea bags.
(Additional links welcome.)
