Tea bag material

Initially in September  I had ordered through my dad some tea bag material ffrom the Tanganda tea company which was the tea we mainly grew up drinking and reminded me of camping holidays especially and wood smoke. I was going to use it print larger scale images in carrying on the search for essence through photography and had thought to use the old TV s at Griffith to display the videos but it struck me that I m working with ephemeral ideas I need to use ephemeral materials. I decided that using the tea bag material to project onto would make more sense conceptually. Thankfully the tea bag material came !!!! Just in the nick of time. I had had my back ups prepared of thinking to use some Kozo paper glued together to make large sheets. Indebted to KC from Tanganda – what a pleasure it was to correspond with him. He donated all the tea bag material for my project – AMAZING generosity from Zimbabwe – thankyou .

The awesome email from KC at tanganda: * so touched*

Dear Cielle

Thank you for this kind note. The pleasure is Tanganda’s. And I must thank Mr. Scott our director who got us in touch.

As a company we know that brands can only grow as they relate and commune with consumers. To have someone in Australia choosing to remember and probably cherish Tanganda is no mean feat. As management for Tanganda we only take the opportunity to show that the brand(s) belong to people like you. The growth of these brands can only be in line with the growth and the message/story around it as carried and told by you, the people who know and relate to it.

We thank you truly for this show of commitment, trust and cherishing of what we believe is an iconic brand whose great, true story has not yet been told. Your works of art is going to be but one among the songs, stories and folklore that must be told of this icon.

We wish you all the best and look forward to meeting you in December.

Kindest regards

Kwirirai Chigerwe (KC)

Next step was to test the dyeing of the material in tea – I did some testers – left the material in the tea brew for 2 hours then spaced each tester half an hour apart but as can be seen from the results it didn’t make a significant difference as to which one was darker.

Dyeing the large rolls of material was next. I boiled up the tea in my aluminium Salvos pot then folded the material and covered it with the brew and left it. Results were great – faintly dyed material.