Here's a great tutorial by my lovely friend Malin, she writes the blog normalean and she makes music as Mary Jane Insane. <3

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Hello dear readers!

I am very happy that Lu invited me to her “Bloc Party“ for the 2^ndtime to share another tutorial I created on my own.

Since it became autumn and finally winter, I started drinking even more tea than I usually do (even in the hottest summer I drink much tea, for it is very healthy!). So this DIY shows you how you can create your own winter tea you can give away or to drink on your own :)

Supplies needed:

- loose winter tea

- big tea filters

- teaspoon

- yarn in red and green, particularly cotton

- paper and pen for your patterns

- a scale

- a sewing machine or a normal needle to sew by hand

I'll later tell you how to make the right mixture, but now I'll show you how to sew Christmassy tea bags. 

1. Draw some patterns for your bags in Christmassy shapes. I used a heart, a star, a moon and a bell. You can use whatever you like most, but it also depends on the tea you use. If you use very fine tea, you can use every shape (like the Christmas tree I also drew, but didn't sew), but if you're gonna use tea which has for example big dry fruits in it like apple slices, you might choose a bigger and not angled shape, like the star for exemple. Before you produce a high number of tea bags, be sure the size is big enough (5-8 g of tea should fit in).

2. + 2.2 Cut out your shapes and pin them onto the tea filter, cut them out with a sewing allowance of approximately 3-5mm.

3. Leave an opening for later filling in the tea.

3.1 Now sew with your sewing machine (fine needle plus stitch lenght of 2), leave 3-4 cm open for easy filling (I chose red yarn, for I like the colour of red and green most for Christmas time, but of course you can use whatever you like).

4. Fill in the tea and scale the filling.

5. Now close the opening with your sewing machine.

6. Sew a thread of double length to the upper middle of your selfmade tea bag to use it properly and maybe to hang it up on your christmas tree. ;)

The tea mixture:

Now I come to the tea mixture. In fact, I went to a tea shop and got some advice of a salesgirl there. I wanted to have some tea with apples (but not too sour and fresh), almonds, cinnamon (of course!), and some other winter/Christmas flavours I adore :) Sadly, you can't really mix yourself a tea, for these shops have so many finished mixes so you don't really need to mix them on your own or you are not allowed to. Sometimes at some Christmas fairs or in pharmacies, you can get loose tea which isn't already mixed.

I used the mixtures: „Gebrannte Mandel“ (rosted almond) and „Winter Apfel“ (winter apple) which have the following ingredients:

Apple pieces, almond pieces, beetroot pieces, hibiscus blossoms, rose hip parings, currants, cinnamon pieces, vanilla pieces and finally, calendula blossoms.

Now you can boil your tea and after the brewing time of 5 to 10 minutes, you can enjoy it with some cookies and a book. :) Have a great winter time!!!

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Awww, Sweetie, thanks for preparing this great tutorial! <3