Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Tea Bag Wreath


My guests can easily see each kind of tea I have without having to sift through my massive, and sort of confusing, collection.  Then, when people leave, I just replenish the wreath.  It's both easy for me and great for all the tea drinkers that frequent our house.

To make a Tea Wreath, you'll need:
-two pieces of 12x12ish cardboard (I used the back covers to two scrapbook paper packs)
-patterned paper that compliments your kitchen decor.  I ended up using one whole piece and part of five pieces . . . .  if you minimized your palette, you could probably do the whole project with two pieces of paper

-clothes pins (I used 24)
-hot glue
-ribbon for hanging
-sour patch kids (apparently, because they made their way into all sorts of pictures along the way. . . . )


1. Hot glue your two pieces of cardboard together (this is to give your base a little bulk since it'll be holding a bunch of clothespins eventually)
Cut the doubled up cardboard into a generally wreath-like shape (a circle, or if you're adventurous, a square).  Make sure the wreath's depth will accommodate a clothespin. 
I traced plates to make my circles (you can see that I didn't like my first choice of inner circle and found something smaller to trace instead).


2. Cover your circle with patterned paper.  I traced my 'wreath' onto the back side of the patterned paper and then cut outside of my lines by about half an inch to give myself gluing margin.  I then notched the margin up to my tracing lines and glued the little tabs around the outside and inside circles.  I'm sure there are other ways to cover a cardboard circle- that's just the way I did it.

3. Cover your clothespins with patterned paper as well.  I cut long strips of paper about the width of the clothespin, hot glued on the long strip, and trimmed the ends.
4. Start hot gluing your clothespins to your wreath.  Continue until the whole wreath is covered in evenly spaced clothespins.  Make sure that the 'mouth' of the clothespin faces the outside of the wreath (otherwise you'll have a whole jumble of tea bags in the center of the wreath and people won't be able to see which kinds you have).

5. Tie a ribbon on your wreath for hanging.  Clip tea onto each of your clothespins.  Hang and enjoy!

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