How to Dye Fabric With Tea

Video Transcript

"Did you know that you can use berries and all sorts of different food products to dye fabric? Hi, I'm Lauren Roy, from Sugar Hollow Farm, in Phillipston, Mass., and I'm going to demonstrate how you can use tea to dye fabric. What you want to do is take about ten to twenty teabags; you can use fruit tea and get a red result or black tea and get a brown result, and boil them in a non-metal pan. So, you boil the water, and then put your teabags in a glass bowl and let it steep until it's good and strong and very dark. Then, you just take your fabric and wet it, and then dip it into the tea solution and you can let it sit. This has been sitting for about eight hours, but you can look at it periodically and decide if it's dark enough. And then take it out, and if you like the result you just rinse it in some cool water, wring it out again, and that will set the color into the fabric. And then you've got your dyed tea, and you can just rinse all of that little extra tea off of there. You can also use this as a paint for just like staining wood, as a nice light stain for it, or for crafts. And like I said, you can use the red tea bag to make a different color than the brown that you get with black tea bags. This is Lauren Roy, from Sugar Hollow Farm, in Phillipston, Mass."