Monday, February 2, 2009

Divination Assignment - Drinking the tea



This assignment had two parts to it - having someone correctly drink the tea for the tea leaf reading, and make something that directly related to the act of drinking the tea.

Well, we finally got the tea drinking part finished. My daughter had agreed to help me out here, but she's been sick, so it's been put off several times.

This morning, we got out the Witch Teapot (just seemed appropriate, you know?), made a rather strong pot of tea (I'm not used to loose tea leaves!) and poured the tea into a very large cup.

My daughter's first reaction? "You *don't* expect me to drink *all* of that, do you?" After assuring her she only needed to sip some, while concentrating on what she wanted to know about, she did try. The tea was too strong, not sweet enough and had no milk in it. So after a few sips, we did the alternate method of pouring off the tea.

She went back to bed, claiming the tea had upset her tummy (which has been having some real problems with keeping things down the past week) and I took the cup outside to photograph the tea leaves, so she doesn't have to do this again. 'Cause she says I only had the one chance. ::grins::

I have this really cool black caftan I could have worn for this .... and it would have fit in so well, too! .... but as it happens to be packed somewhere in storage, that wasn't possible. So ......I wore my flannel pajamas. Hey, they're warm (it's COLD here!), they're comfortable ... and I already had 'em on! And since she gave me a time limit if I wanted her to do this for me, I didn't have a lot of time to fuss with my wardrobe!

::sighs:: I'm afraid, tho, that she refused to stick her little pinky finger out while drinking the tea. She said it was just too much to expect her to *look* foolish as well as feel foolish. The trials and tribulations of a mother/tea leaf reader! LOL

The second part of the assignment was to create something having to do specifically with the act of drinking the tea. I made a pair of lips .... it's a bit difficult to drink without a mouth, you understand. Before attaching the lips to the miniature quilt block, I cut out several layers of quilt batting making each layer slightly smaller to create a pyramid shape. I layered the lips over this & pinned the edges more-or-less in place. The edges are hand stitched using blanket stitch, placed very close together. I tweaked the placement of the edges as I went around the shape. After attaching the bottom lip, I used stem stitch across the line of the mouth. That gave me the opportunity to add some extra batting to the upper lip to make it stand up a bit more than the lower lip. Then I finished attaching the edge using blanket stitch.

1 comment:

Ginger said...

Oh my - this is what happens when people get a little knowledge. The tea was strong because the leaves were left in, so you want to use a little less than normal. You should also use high quality tea with as little 'dust' or fannings as possible (so don't just open a tea bag) ... next, if you use a small pot you will end up with more leaves so use a pot that will hold at least 4 cups of water and swirl it softly before pouring to get those leaves floating ... you know ...
I wrote a book on this for my daughter, maybe if I get you as a partner I can send a copy of it to you.