Tea Bag Fabric

Tea is consumed aplenty in my Spring Farm studio, just not by me - a childhood aversion from mandatory sweet, milky tea has never abated!  All the same, I was totally wowed this Spring by this magnificant wedding dress created in used tea bags by Cornish Textile Artist - Jane Gray - the colours just glowed even on a grey low light day. 

With sustainable fabrics becoming increasingly difficult to source, I thought that I would try my hand at making some tea bag fabric this summer and my kindly students have been helping out by drinking tea in abundance :)

So here's my starting point - a typical view in my kitchen area at the end of one of my workshop days.  My tea bag of choice took a little researching as I sadly found that polypropylene plastic is still used in quite a few brands tea bags.  With a strong desire to use an eco-friendly bag, I ultimately followed Jane Gray's lead and plumped for 'Clipper' Everyday Organic Tea for my initial experiments.  The drying process is pretty simple - I leave the tea bags scrunched up as they are after use on a warm window sill with a bit of residual tea in the bottom of the dish.

Once they have got to the point of being just damp, I open them out to finish drying off completely.  Here are a near to dried bags in all their glory, with a beautiful patina and delicate patterns on the bag fabric. 

 

This appealing and organic colouring is created by 'tannin' which black tea has in abundance, and provides a strong and lightfast bond on natural textiles.  The tea bags need to be reasonably dry before the tea is emptied out.

Emptying the tea bag takes a bit of patience to keep as much of it as possible intact.  My fingers had to learn how to best tear the bag and I found that the longer side tore more easily than the shorter one - I ended up over tearing a fair few bags at the beginning by being too heavy handed.  

I eventurally found a light touch which allowed my fingers to gently nibble away and create lovely soft edges.

And so the day finally arrived when I had sufficent processed tea bags to attempt my first fabric sample.  I have created 'fabric' from all sorts of papery products over the years, however, it felt important that this fabric had minimal additions.  Knowing that the project I had it mind would require a fair amount of stitching and prodding, 

I tried various options to create a stable fabric and it was interesting how precious these little bags that had once easily been discarded became!  Thankfully my day of experimenting came good and here is the backed fabric sample that I found stood up to a many lines of silk hand stitching - hooray!  

And here is my first tea bag projects after many weeks of careful collection and pondering.  I created a patchwork on my chosen backings for all of these projects, chosing the colourings of tea bags that felt most pleasing.  The first project was the hand embroidered notebook with natural dye silks and lined with tea dyed silk - of course!  Then came the tea chest - an obvious choice for keeping my studio tea bags in.  Finally came the spa slippers following on from a project I'd made in velvet.  The last two projects were both machine stitched with backing and waxing and both fabrics stood up to this well.  What has amazed me most of all is how satisfying this whole process has been for me - a non tea drinker who has shyed away from brown since school years!