Tea Advent Calendar

   This tea advent calendar is good for so many reasons. It's perfect for people trying to lose weight or who are on a diet, especially if the calendar is made up of green tea as mine is. I'm not a coffee drinker, purely because I just don't like the taste, and I'm not really all that keen on regular tea. I never knew that hot drinks could be refreshing, but green tea is exactly that.

   The tea advent calendar is dead easy to make. I made mine from 2 metres of red and white baker's twine, 25 tiny wooden pegs, some glittery paint and some teabags.
   I prefer tea bags with tags on them - they're just cuter - and I usually go for Twinings because a) it tastes great, and b) frankly, Twinings know how to present their products. But boxed Twinings tea never usually have tags on them.
   Advent calendars should be mixed and contain surprises, so you can always cover the tags with washi tape or just remove them altogether. Twinings have pick and mix options in their online shop, where you can buy individual tea bags of all kinds of tea. Alternatively you could bag up loose tea yourself.

   I bought a selection of teas from Twinings because I only had boxed tea at the time, and I also collected some tea bags I already had, including Qi, Kandula and Albert Heijns (basically the Dutch Tesco, but despite being cheap, own-brand stuff, it was delicious and boxed gorgeously).
   Twinings are also offering free shipping until December 3rd with the code 1del1113.

   First you gather your materials. I cut my twine into two 1 metre lengths. I painted the pegs in some Martha Stewart paint - Florentine Gold, Sterling Silver and Blueberry Slush glitter paints, and regular Sterling silver metallic paint - and left 5 blank.

   Cut some tiny pieces of paper and wrote the dates on them before sticking them onto the pegs.

   Take your twine and hang it on the wall. Tea bags don't weigh too much but they do add up, so make sure it's secure where you hang it. Then jumble up your tea bags and start pegging them up. Try not to think about it too much, don't arrange all your favourites early on, but if there is a special one you'd like for the 25th - Christmas Day - then keep it to one side.

   I did something different for my 25th. Though I love green tea, I love hot chocolate more. So I thought it would be interesting to try to make a hot chocolate tea bag. There is an immediate problem, however, one I had thought of immediately, and that is that the chocolate, if left in the bag when submerged, would certainly just clump up in the tea bag itself. Therefore you can only really use the tea bag as a visual thing, and when you go to actually have that hot chocolate, you'll need to cut the bag open first and pour the contents into the mug. This means, though, that you can add marshmallows to the mix. See my separate tutorial I posted a few hours ago for how to make this.

   Now you wait for December 1st, then hang it up and start drinking. Green tea genuinely can do wonders for your health. I hated the taste of it at first, but kept drinking it, and after about a fortnight I loved it. Some tea brands can be quite bitter regardless of steeping time, so I prefer Twinings because it always tastes good. My favourite is their Jasmine Pearls green tea. I love it. I also feel better inside than when I didn't drink it, though it could just be my imagination. Regardless, I feel good when I drink it.