Tea for the teeny one

My task? The favours. And what better favour for a tea party than some tea!?

Pink and girly? check. Tea bag holding? check. Tags that look like the end of tea bag? checkity check.

Interested in how I made them? This could serve as invaluable information should you ever find yourself lunching with the Queen or hanging poolside with Wils and Waity Katey KMid. What? It could happen.

First off was the contents. One of my other shower planner gals picked up the tea and chose a nice assortment of a great brand. We wanted to give them a tea that could be as good as what we had at the shower and this variety is Mighty (ha, get it?) high on the yummy-scale.

Each guest got a selection and they were placed in to the pink pillow boxes that you see in the top pic. Which, by the way I found for steal. $5 on clearance at Michaels for a pack of 20! They were in the wedding favour section but I think they work just perfectly to celebrate a pretty baby girl.

Next up was to design and print the label tags. I designed them to look like the ends of tea bags (the part at the end of the string that hangs out of the cup). On them they say “Thank you for attending Julia’s first tea party” along with the shower date.

For those wondering, I designed the tags in my graphic design layout program – Adobe Indesign – but I’m sure you could mock up something similar in your program of choice.

Once printed, I began trimming. First the flat horizontal and vertical cuts on my small cutter. A cutter like this can be found in the scrapbook section of a craft store.

And then I simply freehand cut the little notched edges with regular scissors.

Then I was on to creating the ‘string’ part of the tea bag tag (say that five time fast – tea bag tag. tea bag tag. tea ba…). Knowing that I wanted the ‘string’ to have some life (more on that later) I used pink wire (again, found at the craft store for $5 – deal!). Yes, you read that right, pink! And it must have been meant to be as I got the last roll. Somewhere Molly Ringwald is smiling down. Did I just date myself? “Pretty in Pink”… anyone? <crickets>. Dang.

To create the hole I needed something small. It was at this point I decide that in the future I was going to buy a teeny tiny hole punch because this project marked the 537th time that I wished I had one. But I don’t so I came up with ‘plan B’.

Yes, cardboard and a picture hanging nail. And a very complicated trades skill known as “poking nail through paper in to cardboard”. True story.

After my highly technical hole making I needed to loop my string wire in to the tags.

I used to make jewellery so have some old tools from my teenage bead days. To make a wire loop you:

a) start by bending your wire at a 90° angle (with pliers is easier than by hand)

b) grasp the end with some round nose pliers (like the ones here – I got mine at a bead store) and begin rolling in towards your bended angle (you will be rolling counter clockwise). Only roll the pliers, hold the wire still.

With your loop almost closed you will want to slip in your tag and then tighten up your loop by gently squeezing the outer edges with your pliers.

Now, back to the part about giving the string wire some ‘life’. The reason I used the pink wire was so that my string wire could have some curl and ‘flow’ to it. I didn’t want it to lay flat on the pillow boxes but rather have a little flair – as if the tag had just floated down and landed on the box.

To do that I stole the wooden dowel from one of Chace’s toy flags (What? He was sleeping. I returned it before he woke up) and twisted my wire up the dowel.

Then I slipped the dowel out and pulled/loosened the curl so it wasn’t so rigid and uniform looking.

Then I used a ‘glue dot’ and stuck my tag to the top of my pillow box full of tea. For those not familiar with what a glue dot is you can see some here. They are basically little strong adhesive dots of glue that roll on like tape from a tape runner.

I placed the tag off centre and on an angle.

Then I simply bent my string wire and tucked it in to a corner of the box.

And faster than you could say ‘orange pekoe’ we were done!

The tea party was a great success and everyone seemed to really enjoy the favours.

However, no matter how cute they were, they paled in comparison to the whole reason we were gathering to celebrate…

HOW CUTE IS SHE!? adorable. … squishy, sweet, serene, breathtakingly adorable.

It was a great afternoon.

A few more shots of our fancy little tea party.