Past Work - Teapotty: Tea-leaves
 | | Completed teapot. It shrunk quite a lot as it dried! | ||
 | The idea of making a teapot from tea-leaves was amusing and it seemed possible. The Chinese used to store black tea by compressing it into "bricks" like the one pictured. I hoped I could use a similar technique to create a teapot. | |||
 | I collected used tea-bags and noticed that they got hard and lumpy as they dried. So I started off just emptying a lot of teabags into one of my plaster moulds and patting it into a thickness of around 20-mm. As it dried, it continued patting it, using more force when it seemed appropriate. Result: As it dried further it cracked and broke up. I repeated the exercise, mixing the tea leaves with PVA glue to create a sort of paste . Same result - cracking. | |||
 | I tried creating a sandwich of the paste of tea-leaves and PVA glue with a light plastic mesh inside it. It didn't look nice but it stopped the cracking! | |||
 | I did the same thing in a mould, adding the opened-up tea-bags to the surface and then putting the whole thing on my office radiator to dry out. | |||
 | It worked | |||
 | Some nice turquoise mould started emerging. | |||
 | I joined the 2 halves together using more tea-leaves and PVA glue paste, and made the lid using another plaster mould. The drying process led the teapot to shrink and distort quite a bit, giving it the appearance of something almost archeological! | |||
 | Much later on in the project, I made some moulds for the College's hydraulic press, ostensibly to create the copper teapot. However, using the hydraulic press gave me an opportunity to try exerting a lot of force on tea-leaves, so it rekindled my interest in trying to emulate the Chinese tea-brick process. | |||
 | I reverted to using just tea - no PVA glue or plastic mesh. This was the result. Unsurprisingly, the handles broke up on their removal from the mould. The teapots retained their shape but cracks appeared as the 2 halves dried. Once again, some nice mould grew. The surface texture was like velvet - really rather nice! This is still work in progress. | |||