Brewhaha.

It’s been a while since my last obsession, surely I’m due?

What is it this time I hear you groan?

Tea.

I’ve always liked the idea of tea more than tea itself. Tea parties, tea pots, fancy pants tea blends… they are all very nice & appealing, but me being me, my daydreams are a far cry from reality. I’ve nobody to tea party with, I got rid of my disused teapot collection as our “kitchen” is way too small to cook in let alone display teapots I didn’t use & I’ve always been too lazy to properly brew loose leaves. Usually, when I have a cup of tea, it is steeped from a sad little tea bag & tripped out with milk & sugar. Recently though I have been happily dipping lovely little gauzy pyramids of tea into my cup. With a bit more room to expand, & dare I say it, a higher quality blend of tea, my usually daggy cuppa has gone & had itself a little makeover.

I’ve even been drinking it without milk. Without sugar. I don’t know if you would be able to pay me to drink a normal cup of tea from a regular old teabag without copious amounts of milk & sugar – I’ve tried it in the past & it’s not an experience I remember fondly… but, can you see where I am going here…? I think I am wanting to move even further up the tea appreciation scale. Past the little supermarket bought pyramids & onto those wonderfully exotic loose leaf blends I have so often admired, snuffled & ultimately never bought; if better tea bags produce such a markedly better cup of tea, than no tea bag at all, well, it should be bliss in a tea cup.

Enter the gadget. You know it’s not an obsession with me unless I have a chance to waste spend some money on it…

The ingenuiTEA! I found it while lollygagging about on ThinkGeek, NEEDED to order it & now I am waiting. Waiting. Waiting. The wait has been made all the more painful by lots of lovely tea arriving from adore tea yesterday… what a TEAse! (I kill me.)

All this & not a thing to brew it in! Bec suggested putting some in pantyhose & sticking that in the cup… as truly retro as that would be, I am very sad (not really..) to say I’ve not a single pair to wear, let alone steep tea in….

…so I wait, while regretting my hasty decision to de-teapot the kitchen.

Do you like tea? (I know this lady does, and this one…) Do you know very much about it? I was shamefully un-informed about the the hows & whys of tea before I stumbled into this tea class, if you’ve any interest at all you should check it out – you’ll be spouting (ha! spouting! Like a teapot!) interesting tea facts to everyone you know.

the little tea zine….

I had such a lovely suprise in the mail this afternoon – a cute little parcel of tea-themed goodness from Isis.

A while back Isis put out the call for tea-themed contributions for a zine she wanted to make, I sent her a drawing & she included it for me – very nice of her considering the pool of talent I now know she had contributing! I’m sorry Isis love – my Miss Teapot is positively outclassed!

Anywho – the finished zine is A M A Z I N G. Beautiful, cute, funky, clever & just… well… just my cup of tea. There are tea-themed crafts to make, reviews to read, recipes to drool over, stories to savour… I can’t believe how much dear Isis has been able to fit into this little gem & just how fabulous it all is. Truly! Perfect for sitting down in your favourite armchair with an iced vovo, & yes; a cup of tea. You might need a pot of tea actually, if you plan on getting through everything in just one sitting.

If you would like to see for yourself, you can buy it here for just $5 AND you get a free tea-themed badge!

If you are feeling lucky, you might want to tell me what your favourite drop of tea is in the comments below. I have two copies of this tea-riffic (ha! I kill me!) little zine & I’m giving one away. I’m keeping the badge though. Sorry.

 

My Creative Space.

I don't know how it got to be Thursday again so soon, but I just heard the garbage truck roar by, so oooooohparently it is, & here we are again in 'My Creative Space'.

I am still on the doll making I was contemplating last week, what is it they say... slow & steady wins the race....?! Here are the girls so far - don't worry, they're mostly 'armless. (HA! I kill me!)

I did something I'd never done before with the calico for their bodies - tea dying. I'd been curious about it for ages but just hadn't gotten around to doing any until last week. As is my style, I winged the entire process, also known as "making it up as I go along".

I put a bunch of teabags in a BIG pot of boiling water & waited for the water to get nice & dark, then I added a bunch of salt because I thought I had read somewhere that that helps the dye to take... that could be totally wrong, but hey, it's just salt & can't hurt...

I added the fabric & stirred it occasionally for about an hour (I took the teabags out when one started to leak tealeaves everywhere... oops!!), then I left it covered overnight. I rinsed it in the morning & it lost a little bit of colour, then hung it to dry out a little, before ironing it to dry while it was still a little damp.

Dry, it's a whole lot lighter in colour than when it's wet - so different that I freaked out briefly thinking I had the iron too high or something & had ruined it, but when it was all done I was very happy. I actually have a dress that I think used to be tea dyed until an unfortunate incident with some bleach, so I think I'll have to do a little more of this in the near future - it was fun stirring a big steaming pot of aromatic fabric - I felt like a sorceress putting an evil spell on someones cloak or something... *mwahahahaha*