DIY: Tea (Valentine's Day Gift Idea)

Ollie and I are one of those couples who tend to do the bare minimum for Valentines Day, so this year I decided to make him homemade tea. His addiction to herbal tea is ridiculous; a gift that is tea related seemed like the only option at hand. After much thought I chose to make cranberry flavoured, heart-shaped tea bags because A) a heart is virtually the only shape to use Valentine's Day, and B) cranberry tea turns the water reddish-pink, thereby turning the hearts reddish-pink - ah such cheesiness!

Considering that Ollie and I spend most of our time together, I went to great lengths to keep this a surprise from him. As it happens, I habitually send Ollie my edited pictures to critique and I idiotically sent him the picture above, which completely ruined the surprise. I'm such an idiot. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the DIY!

ITEMS/UTENSILS NEEDED

• Coffee filter paper, unless you can find tea bag paper?
• Loose tea (I highly recommend cranberry tea) 
• Baker's twine OR regular string
• Felt OR other material
• Plain paper
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Teaspoon
• Needle and thread OR sewing machine

The coffee filters I used had two sheets of filter paper stuck together at one side; in other words, they already had a front and back for the tea bag. If you are using singular filter paper, make sure you put two sheets together throughout the entire process listed below.

 DIRECTIONS

Making the tea bag

1. Draw a heart onto a sheet of paper and cut it out. This will be your stencil for the size of the tea bag, one that you can reuse for all the tea bags you create.


2. Use the heart stencil you have made, pencil a heart onto a sheet of filter paper; do not cut the heart out at this stage because it will make the sewing step a tedious manoeuvre. (As mentioned earlier, you should have two sheets of filter paper at this point.)


3. Whilst remembering to leave a 3cm opening (the area I have circled in the above image is a decent place), sew approximately 1cm within the pencil heart. This step will secure the two sheets of filter paper.


4. Use a teaspoon (or make a small paper funnel) to transfer a heap of loose tea into the opening in the tea bag.

At this point, your tea bag should look exactly as the diagram above. It should still have excess filter paper around it, as well as an opening in the heart. 

Adding the string


1. Cut around the original pencil stencil - be sure to cut within the pencil line, because you probably do not want your loved one drinking graphite tainted tea! You could do this step later, but you may result in cutting the string off like I did, whoops!


2. Cut off 12cm of string, or baker's twine, and put about 2cm of this into the opening of the tea bag.


3. Sew the opening shut. It's probably worth going over the string whilst you're sewing so that the string is less likely to fall out.


4. Cut out a heart from felt, or other material. I cut out two at a time, and put them back to back with the tip of the string in the middle (see image below).


5. Sew the felt heart(s) onto the end of the string. This step was the fiddliest because I used a sewing machine, so my advice would be to do this step by hand. I was too lazy.

After the step above you are done, and can marvel at your badass V Day gift.

FINAL PRODUCT

Here is a more detailed picture of what my tea bag(s) looks like. As you can see on the top left part of the heart, I stitched over the opening and the string multiple times to make certain that it would not reopen.

Happy gift making/ hunting!

Bye for now,

Ang

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