Tea for Two...The Frog and the Toad.

For Christmas, I like to make gifts, surprise surprise. I tend to buy a present, and make something for the same person. So when it came to my sister-in-law, Rachel, I had something specific in mind. Rachel and my brother, Joe, have a little one, Drew (he's almost 2, and we still call him Baby Drew, which he will always be known as), and I knew that Rachel's all time favorite children's book was the Frog and the Toad. I had never even heard of these books before Rachel mentioned them a long time ago while she was pregnant and we were grazing the children's section of a bookstore in downtown Newburyport. For some reason, I always remembered that little "golden" tidbit. , my goal was to tie in her favorite children's book, with something they could use to decorate their new house with, and have it relate to being a mom as well, something that she can pass on to Baby Drew.

I had it! A framed picture of a page from one of the books.

I went to the local library to find a couple of the Frog and the Toad books, I then sat on a comfy couch in the children's section and started to read. What was I looking for? Just a page in one of the books that jumped out at me. I had a few favorites, and I proceeded to the copy machine to make photocopies of my choice pages. Those of you that know me know that I cannot make a single decision to save my life, so I copied quite a few to be thought over and decided upon. Luckily, it was only 5 cents/page.

Then, the fun begins. I ripped the edges of some of the pages and burned the edges of the others because I wasn't sure which I exactly wanted. 

Next, crumble them up into little paper balls. 

Open the paper balls back up and time to tea dye. If you've never done this before, it's easier than making a cup of tea! Get a bucket, a pot or anything else you have, boil some water, and put tea bags in your container. Let it steep for 5-10 minutes. The darker you want the dye to be, the more tea bags you use. Once the tea is steeped, take the bags out, and put the paper in. 

There's not really a science to it, I just kept the papers in and took them out when I liked the color, which was about 20 minutes. Take them out, and let them dry. Be careful at this point, as the paper is easily torn. 

Once the paper is dry, it's then time to start the watercolor fun. I used my niece's set of watercolor paints to put some color into the book page. I didn't want too much, just a hint here and there. Having several pages actually worked to my advantage at this point because I could play around with color and not have to worry about ruining it. It's actually really easy to do and it looks so good! The only thing you don't want to do here is worry about too much detail in your painting because it runs very easily. 

Unfortunately, due to holiday rushing around, I didn't take a picture of the final product, the framed, tea-dyed, watercolor page. This is a gift anyone can do, and it's extremely affordable, but at the same time has a lot of sentiment. I even got tears when she opened it, there's nothing better than that!