31 Days off Your Duff {Day 11} - Sewing Your Own Teabags

Reason

One of my friends had just moved away when I decided to start selling full-leaf tea at my shop. She was very disappointed, as she loves tea and we had such an amazing variety here.

This got me wondering what kind of container I could send her several samples of teas in. As I had just recently discovered Pinterest, I was developing a very DIY mindset, and thought,

"Hey, wait! Surely I can just make my own teabags!"

So, I googled making your own teabags, and this cute little blog came up with just such a post.

A Beautiful Mess

All I needed was some thread, coffee filters, and something to dangle on the string. Easy! I had all those already.

Making the Bags

So I got to cutting out my coffee filters. I did all different shapes by just cutting two filters at once, and keeping the identical pieces together.

Next, I stitched them nearly all the way closed, leaving a hole for stuffing tea.

Now, don't make the same mistake I did at first: I didn't want to staple my strings to the bag, so my plan was just to leave a tail of thread when I was done. However, that means you need to end the sewing at a specific point - the place you want the string to actually hang from. As you can see from the pictures below, when I was finished sewing the heart my string ended up randomnly along the side somewhere.

After figuring that out, I was a little smarter with the rest. Once I had done most of the sewing on a teabag, I stuffed in about a tbls of tea, then finished up my stitches.

Lastly, I stapled the tail of the string to a matching cut-out shape, tied a knot around the staple, and ta-daa! I was done.

See the little stitched smiley face at the top? :)

Now, when you go to make your own, make them much bigger than I did. (For some reason, I have always had this mental block towards making things on a large scale) Full-leaf tea deserves to be free, so it can swirl around and properly infuse the water with it's goodness. A teabag is already going to inhibit that somewhat, so try to lessen the restriction as much as possible.

After that, just enjoy!