Dyeing paper with fruit “tea”
I hesitate to call this stuff tea because it isn’t. I have never liked it – far too fragrant and sweet for my taste. I also really dislike herb “teas,” most of which taste like dead grass. I prefer a cup of real tea, my favourite being Lapsang Souchong with its gorgeous smoky flavour, closely followed by Earl Grey.
I have recently discovered some interesting YouTube videos showing people dyeing paper with tea for use in their art projects. I’ve done this on a very small scale in the past, painting tea or coffee onto a piece of cardstock to make an individual card, but never on the almost industrial scale that people are doing! My original thought was to try drying fruit “tea”bags on watercolour paper, as I have always done with regular tea (see my previous post) but thought it was a bit wasteful to do this without drinking the actual “tea.” However, having seen the videos of people dyeing whole sheets of paper, I realised that I didn’t actually have to drink the liquid, and it wouldn’t be wasteful to use it to dye paper instead!
So in my grocery delivery this week were two packs of fruit “tea,” the first being cranberry and raspberry, which I used for this experiment. When I opened the packet, I was a bit disappointed to see that they were rectangular bags and not the folded ones with strings, which unfold into larger pieces of teabag paper, but on closer examination I found that they had a seam down the back, and I think I shall be able to open them out carefully and produce larger pieces than my regular teabags.
I put all the teabags into a large pan and added 2 litres of water and boiled it up. The liquid came out a fabulous rich dark pink colour, as I had hoped it would. I didn’t like the smell much – despite the packet stating that it was made from natural ingredients, it was pretty overpowering and artificial smelling, reminding me why I hate drinking the stuff!!
I let it stand until it had cooled down quite a bit, in order to allow as much colour to be infused as possible, and then scooped the bags out and gently squeezed out the liquid, taking care not to rip them. I arranged these on a large sheet of watercolour paper to dry, scrunching them up a bit in order to produce some interesting stains. You can see that the bags have been stained a nice pink colour. Once they are dry and I can empty out the tea, I think these bags will make an interesting substrate for drawing on, making a change from the regular brown ones.
I tipped the liquid into a large rectangular roasting pan, and then had a good rummage through my stash to select some papers to dye. As well as some 100 gsm printer paper and some 160 gsm printer card, I found some old ledger sheets that had belonged to Dad, lots of doileys (having raided the kitchen!), and some music pages. The cream-coloured ones are from the Novello edition of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which I have sung in a couple of times. I can’t remember where this copy came from but it arrived with the back cover missing, and the final pages of the score missing as well, so it was unusable. Eminently suitable for artwork, then! You can see that it has been annotated by its previous owner who appears to have been a tenor – nice to know that it has been used. It’s got a nice vintage look about it.
Putting the papers into the dye bath. So far, so good. The liquid looks pink.
WhenI came back a few hours later, I found that the pink had changed to a blue-ish slate colour! Very unexpected.
The next picture shows some of the papers having been removed. I didn’t have room on my little table to spread them all out so quite a lot remained in the sink. A lot of the liquid was dripping onto the laminate floor and I was worried that it might stain it, but I mopped it up and all was well. I put newspaper down to catch any further drips.
These papers are definitely NOT pink!! At this stage it was hard to see what the eventual colour would be because they would probably dry a lighter shade. Some of them ripped in the process but I’m not worried about that.
Going back a day later, they were drying out nicely and I was able to stack a few more up. It’s going to take a while for the ones in the sink to dry.
It is very interesting that the teabags themselves have remained pink. Carefully lifting the corner of one of them, the stains on the paper are slate grey. Very curious.
Progress
When I got up this morning I was able to separate out a few more sheets, to help them dry more quickly.
Here’s a close-up of the watercolour paper with the drying teabags.
You can see that they have retained their pink colour. I have moved the one at bottom left to show the stain – this is the one I have been carefully lifting up to check its progress, so I don’t mind if moving it has spoilt it. It looks OK so far, though. I am also delighted with the imprints that the edges of the drying doilies have made on the bottom of the paper. Definitely something to explore further!
I am now managing to remove the top few papers from the stack in the sink as they gradually dry out. I think everything will be dry enough to move in another two or three days.
Watch this space for further developments in this most interesting experiment!
