For Days 25 and 26 of #JunkJournalJuly '24, the prompts were "tea-dyed" and "shade". Entirely unplanned, the journal page just happened to have a neutral-toned franken-paper extension over the original white page. Since I was working with a page which had the beginnings of a neutral collage (I had added a franken-paper page extension earlier), a piece of tan pattern tissue and a corner tuck spot with a vintage tea card image were all that were needed to make the page various shades of beige and brown. Note the tiny strip of pattern tissue on the lower corner of the tea card completes the diagonal starting with pattern tissue in the upper left corner of the page.
As you can see, my tea-dying session started with a fail. Even a gentle sponging with a used family-sized tea bag turned old loose leaf paper into a blurry mess. Not the look I wanted, so the pages are going back in my horde for another day. A page of my stand-by for dyeing, shortened business letterhead, was ready to go. Shortened business letterhead is what one does when corporate document shredding directives endanger a ream of very nice paper. I decided to experiment, so after carefully cutting the damp tea bag open, I spread the tea leaves over the page in a thick layer. After about 10 minutes, I carefully rolled the page up (tea leaves and all) and let it sit a bit more so that the page would be colored on both sides. When it was time to unroll and dry the page, I wasn't careful enough when brushing away excess tea leaves. To keep from tearing it more than I obviously did, I stopped the leaf removal immediately, gently laid the paper on a rack, set the rack on a sheet pan, and baked it for 10 minutes at 250F. Once the page was out of the oven, I used a dry paper towel to remove the remaining tea leaves. The resulting page was fabulous! To make the most of the tear, I glued that section to the back of a handmade envelope. But... the lovely envelope was too large for the page spread so had to go live in the aforementioned horde. So... I cut a 3" square from the tea dyed page to make a tiny envelope (approx. 2.5"x1.75"). Alas, when I added the faux stamp and faint scribbled address lines I forgot to check whether the envelope was right side up. Another fail! Bravely pressing on, I added a 4-page signature to the envelope flap using scraps of tea bag and tracing paper. This too was a fail! I had a third folio in the signature but it slipped out when I sewed it to the envelope (because I thought the stack was too small and thin to need more than just my fingers to keep it in place). Not shown (because it's not neutral shades): a tiny tabbed journaling card made to fit in the envelope's pocket. To give the page tuck more to do, I slipped in a small collaged journal card.