Home Made Tea Bags

Hope everyone had a fantastic Valentine's Day. Here is our last post of hearts for love... I know it's a bit late for this year around but it's never to early to find inspiration for next year!

I want to share these adorable tea bags I've made with my Sister. She primarily made them for her boyfriend, they turned out so cute we just had to make more. We made them for her Sunday school kids to give to their parents, and I made a couple for my sons teachers.

The idea came from this blogger who explains great instructions.
http://asubtlerevelry.com/handmade-valentine-youre-tea-riffic

We tried it out that way but also made our own adjustments.

First of all we cut out several different shapes of hearts, also some straight ended and some scalloped (the scalloped ones were a bit of a pain to cut). Coffee filters is actually what is used to make these tea bags and they can start to rip if they are over worked, this mainly happened at the final sewing step.

One change we started making is, we started off by sewing the two hearts together at the centre "v" part of the heart. We stopped just diagonal from that point and left a length of string to sew the rest once filled. Once it is completely sewn, we left a long enough tail to make the pull string that now comes from the centre of the heart which I think is very cute. This way also eliminates having to punch a whole in the heart, which is one less thing you have to do. And of course a printed tag finishes off the tea bag perfectly.

The other thing I want to tell you is the sewing method in the original post is certainly nice and practical... But it takes forever! We found that a straight stitch worked up a lot faster and actually created quite a nice look and certainly still holds the contents in place.

For our tea we used dehydrated strawberries and kiwi. And added some rock sugar for sweetening which is some German brand that I cannot translate. We let the kids fill them up and finished sewing from the point we left off.

I placed the ones for my sons teachers, in small ziplock bags with labels describing the flavour.

And that's our home made tea experience! I think they are very clever and unbelievably cute! And who doesn't love a cup of tea! This obviously made a great valentines gift, but the possibilities are really endless since you could do any shape. And any flavour for that matter, just dehydrate whatever fruit you want and there you go. You could also use leaf tea bought at specialty tea stores, or I thought of dried apples and cinnamon sticks. I could have a hay day and I'm sure you could too. Enjoy!

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