Adventures in Tea Dyeing

If you have been following along on my Instagram, I have been doing a lot of ecodyeing and ecoprinting over the past year. I have been getting some really exciting results, (which you can find over on Instagram).

Now that winter is here and the plants have lost their leaves (or have lost the colour from the leaves that are left) I have not been able to do any ecodyeing. (Side note: since writing this, I have discovered you can use frozen/dried leaves to ecoprint with and have been trying it out with promising results!) Instead, I have been experimenting with tea dyeing.

I wanted to use tea dyed paper in my books (an example of which is in my last post) and junk journals. It is so simple and easy to do and can be done reasonably quickly, so I have managed to amass quite a good number of papers in a short amount of time.

I have previously used black tea while eco dyeing, in the water to give the papers some extra colouring. Recently, however, I have been trying out dyeing paper with black tea on its own, using different methods. I have also moved on to using fruit teas as well to create more colours. It has been quite a frustrating process at times (teas don’t always dye the colour you expect them to!) but I am slowly working out what does and doesn’t work.

I have used a few different types of tea, including black tea, cranberry/raspberry, blackberry/blueberry, beetroot and strawberry. I have also been doing two different methods of dyeing: boiling over heat for 15 minutes and then leaving to cool (I have done this in both rusted and non-rusted roasting tins) or soaking in tea for 30 minutes to 2 hours, and allowing the tea to sit and pool on the paper while drying to create darker patches.

I’ve noticed a few differences between the two methods that have allowed me to get a variety of papers.

Boiling the paper creates more marks due to how the airs bubbles get trapped between the sheets. On one side the marks are quite dark, but on the reverse of the paper, the marks are light.

Soaking the paper, on the other hand, gives more of a flat colour. I have created marks by allowing the tea to pool on the paper as it dries, although I have found it is the most effective with black tea on heavier weight paper (I was using cartridge paper).

I noticed that dyeing the papers in a rusted pan gives a darker colour to the paper and creates more contrast.  In the case of black tea, it even gives the paper a purple colour around the edge.

I have also noticed that different types of paper dye as slightly different colours. It is probably the most noticeable with the beetroot tea, where the papers have dyed various shades, from pink to peach.

I wanted to create dyed paper that I could use to make junk journals with, so I dyed a few different types of paper, such as lined, squared, and stationery paper, in different weights, as well as envelopes and tags.

As much as I enjoyed the process of dyeing these papers, the biggest point of frustration for me was being unable to create pink paper. The cranberry/raspberry tea coloured the water pink, but dyed the paper blue/teal. The blackberry/blueberry tea coloured the water pink/purple, but dyed paper blue (although this is less surprising). The strawberry tea didn’t give much colour at all, but it does dye the paper a very pale blue/green colour. The only tea that turned the paper pink was the beetroot tea.

There is definitely more to experiment with in terms of getting different colours and effects from the teas. I have seen some people get pink dye out of cranberry/raspberry tea, so I am curious to find out how they achieved it. I am not sure if you would get different results if instead of soaking the tea, you painted it on, but I am wondering if It would still change colour when left it to dry.

I am currently working on junk journals that I have made using my tea dyed paper. Here is a ‘sneak preview’ of one I have made already:

I have also decided to offer some of my tea dyed papers as digital downloads (I hope to put together packs of papers for those who prefer the real thing!), which you can find here.