Friday, September 26, 2008

Got tea bags?

I've mostly given up coffee. Over the years I've gone from being an indiscriminate 4-5 cup a day coffee freak to sipping on organic green tea throughout the day. For the longest time, I was buying green tea bags that weren't individually wrapped. Unfortunately, I've been having a hard time finding organic green tea bags that aren't individually wrapped, and am thinking that the way to go will be to buy loose tea, even thought I'm pretty sure that I've only seen it sold by Lipton's (or some other similar company). The smart thing to do would be to give it up altogether. Maybe someday.

So we recycle paper at work and I've been throwing my little tea bag wrappers into the bin (and even bringing the ones I use at home). Then I stumbled across this neat idea on the Instructables website and think that I may very well give it a try this weekend. The instructables' creator even has some images up on her website for Xmas card ideas. I decided to nose around a little and ended up finding this website that contains links to other sites devoted to tea bag folding. More Google searches showed me that tea bag folding (aka kaleidoscope folding) is apparently quite a popular hobby and has been so for years -- especially for folks who like things like origami. Unfortunately, a lot of people print out their own ''tiles'' to use instead of recycling tea bags or reusing decorative paper, which would sort of defeat my own purpose in trying this out at all.

5 comments:

mv said...

I ended up doing the opposite: I gave up caffeine for over a year, then went back to it. I drink about three cups a day. I figured there are more pros than cons to continuing my habit and just fell back into it. :o) Now, if I could just couple my coffee drinking with regular exercise, I'd be staving off skin cancer!

M said...

I wasn't dumping on coffee and saying that it's inherently bad. Too much caffeine makes me jittery, though. Plus coffee itself seems to wreak havoc on my digestive system. I figure that green tea just gives me that little bit of an edge that's just right.

jessy said...

that's too cool on the tea wrappers! we used to toss ours in the compost pile we've dug out behind our house - but i like the idea of creatively reusing them! thanks! :D

we do have some loose tea - i love it so. a little more inconvenient at times, but it's tasty - and kinda fun! we've got a tea shop in town that has lots of organic loose teas, oh - but what i wanted to say was that "clipper" teas are organic (i know they have an organic fair-trade green tea) - and they're not individually wrapped. the box itself isn't wrapped in plastic, but all the loose tea bags inside are wrapped in a plastic-foil like thingy - but it's tasty organic green tea, and i found it at my local grocery store in the organics section. maybe you'll have some luck finding it, too! you should post some pictures of the tea bag folding you do - that would be really cool! :D

mv said...

I didn't think you were dumping on coffee (I'm just justifying my habit). :o)

M said...

Jessy -- thanks for the tip. I was going to look around for some this weekend, but it's been raining (Kyle's about to settle into the area).

Vegatee -- That's why I didn't just suggest wearing longer sleeves. :-P