How to Tea Dye Curtains

When I last had you all up to the Master Bedroom (take it easy, it's not that kind of party) we got to take a look at the new West Elm inspired nightstands I built and the new lamps: 

I was particulary excited about the lamps, since they added a new cream color to the pallet.

Here's what it looks like with the lights out:

I was planning to add more color and dimension to this room, and originally I was thinking of going bold with a dark plum, eggplant or indigo.  That was until I found this, much more calming inspiration from West Elm.

I love the way the beige brings a natural tone to the room.  When we found the lamps, with their cream colored shades, and I was Jessie Spano excited that they worked. The next step was to find more ways to bring the color into the room.  And I was looking at those boring, and not-working-for-me white curtains.

I've read that tea dying is a nice technique to dye white fabrics a slight, and natural tan color.  But the best part- since the dye is all natural, if you don't like the result, you can just bleach your fabric back to white.  Fail proof DIY- that's what I'm talking about.

 So all I did was fill a big stock pot about 3/4 full, brought it to a boil, and put in 10 regular tea bags.  (I used black tea, but from what I gather any kind will do.)  After letting the tea bags seep for 5 minutes, I removed them and placed in 1 curtain panel at a time. 

It was trial and error.  The first time I soaked my curtain way too long (about 25 minutes), and even after I had rinsed all the tea out with cold water, it was much too dark.  I just threw it in the wash on a light cycle with soap though, and it came out the perfect color.  The next curtain panel I filled up a new pot, with 10 new tea bags, and this time only kept the curtain in for 5 minutes, which was perfect.  If you remember, we have a little problem with windows in the Master Bedroom, which we're still trying to figure out a solution for, but in the mean time I had 4 more curtain panels to dye.  I didn't want to buy my local grocery store entirely out of tea bags, so for the next panel I put it back into the same pot, but this time soaked the curtain a little longer, 10 minutes.  That seemed to do the trick and made them all roughly the same color.  Then I just needed to brew up 1 more pot for the remaining 2 curtains.  After they were all rinsed off and hung to dry, I had this:

I haven't hemmed the curtains yet, because I wanted to make sure I liked them first.  That's up for this weekend. 

I like that the color is subtle, and that the tea dye gave them a natural look and texture.  I hesitate to even show you this angle, because Lord knows I hate these windows to the Living Room, but you know how I am about here about over sharing.  The good, the bad and the uh-gly.

We may not even have curtains over on these windows once all is said and done, but it's nice to have them now in the meantime for a tiny little sliver of privacy. 
Sort of.