2018 #9 Vintage Neutrals: Time for Tea with ETS {by Helen Chilton}

2018 Topic 9: Vintage Neutrals

Well, Helen earns the title Lady Tea bag after this post! You won't believe what happens when she starts staining with different types of teas! Now you know what do do with those cold cups of tea! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Helen with you today, and I'd like to share with you a tag made in a vintage neutral colour palette, not what you might immediately associate with me but it was a challenge that I very much enjoyed.

Vintage neutrals made me think of tea staining so that's what I did, after a fashion. I started with some regular tea and then raided my husband's coffee van for some more interesting ones such as green tea and berry tea. It was the latter that was the real surprise - on the fabric and tissue paper it produced a beautiful vintage pink/purple, but on card or paper this dried to a lovely grey.

Everything on here is either coloured, stamped or stencilled with tea, except for one of the hearts and a little bit of background stamping. I chose Tracy's stamps for this as I love the scribbly and loop the loop effect.

Here's my selection of tea.

And here's what the three different ones looked like - see what I mean about the Berry tea?

I put some into a mini mister and sprayed through a stencil which I then flipped and stamped with.

When wet it's pink.....

...then dries to grey. The green tea gave a lovely soft green colour.

Then I added some ordinary tea stencilling and some stamping.

The first two hearts were stamped with the tea - I was quite surprised it worked using a tea bag as an inkpad, but it gave a lovely watercolour effect.That's stained tissue paper behind the first two.

I wanted to show you this as you can really see the stencilling and the lace and calico stained with tea too.

I had great fun adding all the beads - the little ones were actually bracelets that I cut, knotted to the right length and stuck down - easier than sticking each bead separately.

I love this sort of project as there are so many tiny details plus it's fun to use products that you don't normally and see what they can do - I like the unpredictable! I'm expecting you to get out all your different tea bags to see what colours they produce! Of course, if you dry out the tea bags you can use them as well. A bit of stitching would go nicely too - didn't have room for it on my tag but it would certainly fit the theme.

Helen

Blog: A Splash of Colour
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The current topic link Topic 9: Vintage Neutrals will close 17:00 (London Time) Sunday, May 13th 2018, and the winner will be announced 2 hours later at 19:00.