by Susan Hibberd

Created on: October 24, 2007

Staining fabric with tea is one of the easiest ways to color your home craft projects. It's really simple,but you can get fabulous results.

Tea staining works best on natural fabrics, so pure cotton is best, with linen and wool coming close second. Silk will also stain nicely.

The color you get will depend on the type of tea you use. Ordinary drinking tea gives a range of brown shades. Herbal teas will give anything from light yellow, through orange and red to deep purple.

As you will know from getting fruit stains on your clothes - these dyes aren't easy to get out. Some dyes need a fixative to keep them looking fresh and bright, but ordinary tea seems to keep its color well. Some of the fruit teas, which are made from a mixture of petals, leaves and bark, sometimes bleed and run. As they are all different, I am afraid you'll have to do a bit of testing.

Mix up your dyes by steeping the tea in hot water. This means emptying the tea bag, or putting a spoonful of tea into a cup and leaving it. Try different strength potions to get different strength colors.

I recommend doing a test square before putting anything precious into the dye. Use a square of similar fabric to your craft project, and dye it and dry it first. You could use old sheets cut into squares for this.

Once your dye is cool, you can dunk your fabric in it. Pour the dye into a bowl large enough for the fabric to move around.If you scrunch it all up you'll get a tie-dye effect. If this is what you want, then that's great - but if you want an even color the fabric needs to move.

Leave it for a few hours. Don't forget to write down which brand of tea you used, how many spoonfuls of tea you put in and how long you left it to soak. All this will affect the final color, and if you want to repeat it, you'll need to know what you did!

Another way to get the stain onto the fabrics to sponge it on. Make up the stain as before, then use a natural sponge to dab it onto the fabric. This is suitable for smaller areas of fabric and gives a distinctive mottled look. You could build up layers using different strengths of tea.

It's great fun to dye things with natural projects. There are so many variations, you'll never get bored. Let me know how you get on!

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