Although hosting a fancy tea party, or creating crafty tea themed treasures is a wonderful thing to do at anytime of the year, it is an absolutely fantastic idea during the month of June. June is National Iced Tea Month, and June 10th is National Iced Tea Day, so there is no better time of the year to create and give gifts in a Tea Time Theme than in June. If you are a creative person, or even just someone who dabbles in crafts when the urge occasionally hits you, you will be presently surprised by the large number of Tea themed craft ideas that can be easily designed for gift giving on National Iced Tea Day.
Tea parties are usually hosted in the most elegant of fashion, so if you are hosting an Iced Tea Day Party have each guest bring with them a bonnet, and all the ribbons and bows that they will need to decorate it. Before the tea actually begins, have each guest design their own special Tea bonnet, and then which they can wear for the duration of the tea party. This is a wonderful event to get your guest socializing, as they tend to borrow, and trade ribbons, bows and flowers while they work on their bonnets. If you have men in attendance it can make for a very humorous afternoon as they too are required to fashion a bonnet for the event.
A nice Tea themed craft idea is to prepare gifts of tea using either pre-designed envelopes or ones that you create on your own. This gives you the opportunity of placing your own unique message on each of the tea envelopes that you create. Once you have your envelopes made you simply fill the tea bags with your choice of herbal, green, white or Oolong teas. A wonderful site where you can pick up free patterns is http://alenkasprintables.com/teabags.shtml . There are a variety of Tea Envelope designs available at this site, and these can be easily edited to your own preferences, and then printed off from your home based printer.
These Tea Envelopes can also be used to create unique varieties of loose leaf tea. Purchase bulk teas, herbs, and dried fruits and berries at your local health food store and then mix and match to create your own distinctive teas. Ginseng - spearmint - blueberry perhaps, or Green tea - lemon grass- ginger, you are only limited by your imagination. You can also use these same envelopes to create a gift selection of seeds that are for popular Tea herb plants. Lemon grass, spearmint, peppermint, chamomile, fennel, lavender, thyme, rose and bee balm(commonly known as bergamot). But don't stop there, you can also create a window box Tea Herb Garden, and plant the most popular and easily grown herbs for tea. Lemon grass, spearmint, peppermint, thyme and chamomile.
Crafty little Iced Tea Recipe Booklets are very easy to make. There are an array of iced tea recipes available online and it is very easy to print off recipes from the Internet. Place each recipe on a separate page in your book, and then bind the pages together with either a cloth, or construction paper cover. Use a hole punch to make holes along the left side, or top side of your pages, and then bind the pages together with brightly colored ribbon or string.
A wonderfully relaxing craft idea for National Iced Tea Day is a Bath Tea Bag. You simply need a two square pieces of cloth approximately 2 to 6 inches in size. Using a sewing machine, stitch your square into a pocket, leave the top of this pocket open so you will be able to fill your Bathtime Teabag with your choice of dried flower petals, bath salts, epsom salts, sea salt, milk powder, green tea, oatmeal flakes, bath scents or scented oils. After you have your pocket filled, either fashion a drawstring closure, or stitch the remaining side closed. Add a string to the top of your Bathtime Teabag so it is able to dangle into the bathtub.
One of the easiest craft to design in a tea theme is a Tea Time Gift basket. This is a great project for a group of people to do together because you can each bring a selection of items to swap, trade, and share as you are filling your baskets. Items to gather for the baskets are: teacups or mugs, tea balls, teaspoons, a selection of herb teas, a selection of loose leaf teas, a selection of green, black, white or Oolong teas, small packages of cookies, mints or other small candies, cupcakes or small cakes, cinnamon sticks, tiny jars of honey, small packages of sweeteners, and any other items that you know would be sure to delight the person that you are preparing your basket for. Be sure to bring plenty of ribbons, bows, flowers, tinsel, bells and glitter to decorate your basket with. Also keep in mind that you don't have to limit yourself to just themed baskets when celebrating National Iced Tea Day, use a bonnet instead, and fill it with all the tea themed goodies that you would otherwise place into a basket. You can even choose to fill a teapot or teacup with packages of assorted mints and teas.
However it is that you decide to celebrate National Iced Tea Day, on June 10th enjoy a nice cold cup of iced tea, and have a wonderfully refreshing time doing so.
Sources:
http://greenliving.suite101.com/article.cfm/diy_make _bath_tea_bags
http://www.altnature.com/gallery/beebalm.htm