Bringing a few things together here. I was wondering how to get some celtic knotwork onto used tea bags. Last night I tried using carbon paper on bags that I had prepared with acrylic medium. It didn’t really work. The creases in the bags caused some distortion of the image. Also, I was trying to use ink and it didn’t really adhere all that well to the bags.

This evening, I thought I’d try it with untreated bags. So I opened out a few of them, carefully removing the tags first, and then I traced the images directly on to the bags. Because they were untreated, the ink worked better although the black outline ran a bit until I used a Sakura Micron pen. The Microns are filled with archival ink. I remember doing a little test some years ago to see which black markers ran least when exposed to water. The Microns were the best.

The problem with the untreated bags is that they are a lot more delicate and stretchy than treated ones, and so it’s difficult to be precise. I probably wasn’t as patient as I could have been with these, but I’m quite pleased nevertheless.

The final problem was putting the bags back together when I’d finished drawing on them. Folding wasn’t a problem because the creases were still there but I wanted to get the tags back on. I raided Christine’s sewing box and found a big needle and sewed the tag strings back on to the bags. Problem solved.

Here they are, first without tags and then with the tags reattached …