The first day of festival I taught Tea & Ephemera which is a class focused on learning a variety of mixed media techniques: drawing on tea bags and adhering them to fabric 
working with printed tea bags
collaging a variety of art papers, napkins, book pages and foreign language newspapers
additional color is applied with paint and colored pencils
rubber stamps provide more options for creating texture 
paint sticks used with commercial stencils and cut freezer paper can create transparant or opaque patterns to overlay imagery
I love having young students in my class. They still have their creative confidence intact and always do amazing work.
we even added printing with thermofax screens into the mix.
It was a fun day of exploration, and after class everyone hit the show floor for opening night.
It was also nice to see the Artists Village again, I had totally forgotten it was going to be at the show, it had a wonderful location between the 12 x 12 exhibit and Tactile Architecture.
This is my house from the exhibit, which is constructed using abaca paper (tea bag paper) that I printed with images and painted, adhered to heavy weight interfacing, quilted and stitched together into a house.
Ooh, nice! I've been wanting to experiment with tea bags for a while now, and these are some of the most vibrant and colorful examples I've seen... Time to get to the tea drinking!
ReplyDelete~~~the Art of Inclusion~~~
I have never heard of making art with teabags. I love my tea so I have a lot of them. Are you using used ones to get the tea colour or are you buying the fillable teabags? I too teach workshops and classes with kids and adults and am always looking for new techniques and materials. Thank-you very much - I really enjoyed your post.
ReplyDeleteYour tea bag technique is one of my favorites. It looks like your students agree. Fabulous work and all so individual. Wishing you a beautiful week.
ReplyDeleteLooks like your students had a lot of fun learning new techniques. I wished I had been there!! Great post!
ReplyDeleteWooHoo! so much FUN!!! Peace, Mary helen Fernandez Stewart
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun class! Never thought of using tea b ags but why not? Thanks for sharing
ReplyDeleteThis was a fantastic class with Judy, who did such a great job bringing all of the different materials and encouraging us to explore so many new techniques. Highly recommend to any fiber arts group or even more traditional quilt groups looking to explore outside the box. Thanks again, Judy!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Janet!
ReplyDeleteHi Morgen, I like used teabags because they have beautiful tanin stains to add a little more interest to the design. They are fairly transparent so designs can be traced onto them, they are so thin that when they are adhered to fabric they virtually disappear and lastly because it's paper additional color can be added easily with paint and colored pencils.
ReplyDeleteVery cool class images. You are so talented
ReplyDeleteIt looks like everyone had so much fun! Beautif.l creations!
ReplyDeleteDo you drink all the tea before the bags are used in your classes or do you acquire them from friends? Or perhaps are they something you can actually buy? I never knew the tea bags you used were paper. For some reason I always guessed they were fabric. Can you tell I'm not a tea drinker. ;)