{Wedding Project} Tea-dyed, hand-stamped rose petals

I love fresh flowers (after all, I am a living, human female with a soul). More specifically, I love fresh roses. I intend to have them at each table of our wedding reception. What I don't love about fresh rose petals is the cost. On the other hand, I wasn't wild about the idea of vaguely unnatural artificial rose petals at each table either. My solution: REALLY unnatural rose petals!

Now, bear with me a minute. What I decided was that rather than have fake rose petals that masqueraded as real, I would use fake rose petals that didn't even try to look real, and instead looked like a handmade craft project. Because they are! I took inexpensive artificial rose petals, used the old tradition of tea-dying to give them a vintage flair and stamped them with whimsical wedding stamps.

Here's how I did it:

First, I boiled a large stockpot of water and about two dozen (yes, 24) tea bags. Plain old Lipton or any sort of black tea works great. I simmered this until the tea was really dark. I then dumped about two thousand (yes, thousand) rose petals into this liquid and stirred. I let them soak for a few minutes before spreading them out on paper towels. It's not an exact science, but you may want to test out a few petals to see if they are the shade you like; if they're not dark enough, just leave them in a little longer. This part is a little messy, so be careful not to get tea stained countertops. I let them dry at overnight until they were papery in texture.

I then started stamping. I found some cute stamps that said "happy wedding day!" and "Mr. & Mrs." but I also used a damask stamp and an "M" to add some variety and personal flair to the petals. I used an inexpensive brown ink pad from Michaels and stamped about 100 of each stamp and divided the petals up into small bags for each table, along with the unstamped dyed petals. When the reception setup begins, just simply scatter about 50-100 petals for table. Very cute and it really doesn't take as much time as you might think!

Happy crafting!

Megan

Materials List:

-Rose petals in Ivory from Efavormart

-About 24 black tea bags

-Lots of paper towels

-Rubber stamps of your choice (I chose five different stamps for some variety)

-Ink pad of your choice (I used chocolate brown to offset the light tea color of the petals)