Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Where coffee is seen as fuel to save your soul at work, tea is the mellower sister. The hot beverage is not only steeped with health benefits but it also casts a sense of calm and tranquility especially during a challenging moment in the day and it seems to be trending in home and garden retailers across the globe.
Graphic designer Lana Effron, for example, has fashioned an array of cotton tea towels hand-painted with winsome baby woodland animals and posies to dry cups and are also pretty enough to serve as napkins at teatime, too.
New York City designer, Michael Michaud, who is known for his botanical-themed jewelry, has also crafted home accessories that are suitable for throwing an elegant tea party. Each piece includes delicate details of flowers and leaves that Michaud was able to retain by casting molds over the actual materials. Napkin rings molded on gingko leaves, for example, are bathed in soft, gold metallic finish. Petite orange blossom teaspoons are cast on foraged leaves and flowers, clad in gold- and silver-plated bronze, then finished with tiny seed pearls.
A set of bronze-finished pewter teaspoons has the distinctive print of a honeycomb on the bowl, with a little bee on the tip of the handle. Bronze condiment spoons are formed so the shape of a calla lily becomes the bowl.
Enjoy tea time with clay mugs stamped with imagery of elephant, duck, deer and bear families crafted by pottery maker Colleen Huth. Potter and animal lover JoAnn Stratakos also carves endangered animals onto her stoneware mugs and for each mug sold, $5 goes to Global Wildlife Conservation. Sales of her rhinoceros mugs help support PARCA, a rhino advocacy organisation. In this case, a cup of tea truly makes everything better and as English playwright Sir Arthur Pinero once wrote, “where there’s tea, there’s hope.”
