Tea Towels (Made With Real Tea!)

This...

...plus this...

...equals this...

Here's the before and after...

I'm pretty satisfied with the results- especially for how simple the process is. I basically just made a big pot of tea (twenty tea bags in about 10 cups of hot water), then added the towels (four of them)  and let them simmer for about an hour.  The one thing I will do differently next time is not fold the towels in half when I hang them to dry.  They all ended up with a Shroud of Turin kind of look down the middle because the tea didn't dry evenly.  The instructions I found here include a step for rinsing the fabric in water before drying it in the dryer.  I skipped this step because I wanted the towels to hold as much of the tea coloring as possible.  Instead, I let the towels air dry overnight and then popped them in the dryer as soon as I knew they weren't going to turn the inside of the dryer brown.  As soon as I pulled them out of the dryer I pressed them all with a hot hot iron to make sure the color was good and set.  The dyed towels in the before/after picture above have been washed/dried once and seem to have maintained an adequate amount of tea stain.  This was pretty much just an attempt to create an alternative to the stark whiteness of the original towels so in that regard, I think I succeeded.