Tammy's Recipes

This week is going to be a full week of projects. For starters, I have put off filing our taxes and am only just now working on that. After dreading the process for months (mostly due to the time involved!), I know I will feel greatly relieved when it's over. I am generally not a procrastinator so I'm not sure why I've waited so long on this!

One project I recently did was organizing my teabag collection. It was already organized, but over the past year, I had collected many more empty teabag wrappers and needed to put them in my albums. I took a photo of the kitchen counter where I was working.

For those of you who have never heard of collecting teabags, my collection is basically one of each "design" of any and every teabag wrapper/envelope, including the little tags. I drink the tea and save the wrapper.

I started my collection when I was 13 or 14 (I really can't remember now!) and eventually found other collectors (mostly in other countries) and have traded tea with several ladies over the years. My collection has several thousand different teabag envelopes, but it's tiny compared to some collectors who have ten times as many!

When I was younger, I had much more time and money to devote to buying and trading tea. At this point in my life, I can't really afford to buy every new tea in the stores, or to do a lot of trading; nor do I have the time.

Since I still love drinking tea, I save all of my wrappers, and some of my friends save wrappers for me, also. My pile of "empties" grows, and once a year or so, I sort them all out. One of each kind goes into my collection, and the rest get sent to my collector-friends.

I think teabags are my only real collection of anything. I love collecting something that's "free", and I think they're fascinating! And my entire collection only fills part of a shelf on our bookshelves. For a practical tightwad like myself, it's the perfect thing to collect. ;)