How to Make Flowering Tea Balls at Home

Things you need:

(1)  thread- made from cotton, hemp, or linen. Needs to be a pure natural fiber thread. You don't want a polyester thread because you'd end up with plastic in your tea.

(2) a needle

(3) wax paper and a heavy book

(4) Green Tea leaves

 (5) Edible Flower(s)- You want to have some type of edible flower to place between the leaves since it's a flowering tea ball you're making.  So pick one with a pretty blossom.  Jasmine, lilies, lavender and squash blossoms are a few examples.

Make sure your leaves and flowers have not been sprayed with pesticides. Organic is usually best.

Also, please research whatever flower you want to use to make sure it is edible. Sometimes only certain parts of the flower are edible.  See our Edible Flowers for Making Blooming Teaballs article to safely ascertain what you can use in your tea balls.

 

Now for the fun part:

Instructions:

Gather together a handful of green tea leaves. Flatten the leaves before sewing by putting them between wax paper inside a heavy book for an hour. (Don't forget about them though or they'll wither and become too dried up to easily sew.

 how-blooming-tea-is-made

Arrange the leaves flat in the shape of a wheel.  Put your flower blossoms in the middle of the tea wheel.

*** The first thing you do is run the needle up through the flower stem. If you are using more than one flower, hold the stems together while holding the bunch together. Sew through, gathering  each one so it keeps the bundle  together. Then wind the thread around the bottom of the stem(s) so it will stay together. Knot it off and once your stems have been stitched together, you'll add the smaller leaves around the stems. You'll do this by running the thread through the middle of each individual leaf and pushing down the string close to the stems as you continue threading them together. Keep pushing those together and wind tight around the floral stems. Take care to get each leaf bunched and sewn together.  Keep going back and forth  gathering them in around the bundle but not too tight or they'll tear. Tie a knot with thread and then cut.

Now start tucking the flowers in and rolling it in the palm of your hand to make it look like a ball. Take more thread ( you don't need a needle here) and wind it around and around to look like a ball of leaves wound with string.  Tie it off and leave it alone until it's dehydrated or if you don't want to wait a few days, put it in the oven on very low heat for about 20 minutes.

 

TIP: Be sure to remove the outer string once the leaves have dried in place.

Once you take the outer thread off the dried tea ball, you're ready to steep it in hot water and watch the leaves unfold to reveal the flower within.  A beautiful flowering tea ball hand-made by you!

Now if all this sounds like a lot of work and time, it's because it is.

But the benefits of drinking blooming teas are many, and so it's worth it!

 

BUT... if you don't have the time or patience, and still want beautiful, delicious flowering tea, consider ordering  a canister of already prepared blooming tea balls and flowering teas. Tea artisans use the finest green teas available. The green tea leaves and flowers are 100% safe and pesticide-free and totally edible so you don't have to worry.

They then hand-sew them into balls or heart-shaped tea blooms that produce beautiful, flavorful flowering teas each and every time! (This is good because many times the hand-made versions won't open when the hot water is poured over them if you stitched the leaves or flower stems incorrectly.) That's certainly no fun to watch, especially after so much time and effort.

And lastly, because each flowering tea ball can be re-steeped up to 3 times, buying flowering tea blooms can prove more cost- effective than buying loose leaf teas, organic edible flowers, herbs and natural thread and doing the work yourself.

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