I usually only make my own cards at Christmas time – and it’s usually a mass-production, last-minute job! This year an idea fell into my lap, as our Creative Stitch group had used teabags recently and I had over enthusiastically prepared a very large batch. Not only that, but I had left them to steep for too long and they were a very dark brown nut colour. Not particularly inspiring to use! So, as in the last post when I used Koh-I-Noor dye on the bags, I set about changing the colour. This time I used brusho and picked purple, emerald green and turquoise, as I needed dark colours to attempt to cover up the dark brown.
Doing each stage of any process to all the teabags in one go is much more time efficient, and when you are doing about fifty cards that is important. Even at this stage I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with the teabags but I have tried one idea that I’m happy with, detailed below. So if you receive a Christmas card from me every year then you’ll know what you are going to get! One happy by-product of all this is the drop cloth that I spread under the teabags – I absolutely love it!
When dry, I stamped the teabag with pearly white acrylic paint, using a commercial fir tree block. While the paint was still wet I sprinkled on some embossing powder and then ironed it. I usually heat gun my embossing powders but I thought it might be a bit fiddly with such a small surface area and the iron flattened the teabag nicely ready for stitching.
Next I threaded up my machine with some magenta thread and stitched onto the tree, just enhancing the shape. It didn’t show enough, so I went to navy, which was much better and gave definition to the tree. I did put a patch of fabric underneath the teabag to support it as I stitched, but some of the teabag started to come away, so I snipped around the bottom and sides of the tree to give a uneven edge, which I much preferred. I also snipped away the side edges of the teabag and just left the ‘corrugated’ strip at the top. Finally, I cut a tiny circle of bondaweb for a moon and ironed on silver foil, adding one of those cheat peel-offs to say Happy Christmas! Only another forty nine to do!
JOLLIETEXTILES 