Tea Painting

I was going through the cupboards today trying to think of something to do. Here's what we came up with.
I had a box of fruit herbal tea so I decided I'd sacrifice a little to playtime. I took out a packet of each of the kinds of tea for Matthew to smell (there was peach, cherry, apple etc.) and we smelled all the different kinds. He liked doing that.

Then I thought it might be a good idea to try to paint with some tea...so I prepared a cup of the cherry herbal tea for our paint. I thought that would be the brightest color (it wasn't very bright). I had him help me add the bag to the hot water (carefully) so he could see the water change color. Then we let it steep for a few hours to make the color brighter and let it cool down. I didn't have any white paper or brushes so we painted with Q-tips on a white paper plate - Matthew liked the Q-tip approach to painting. The tea itself was not nearly as bright as I was hoping. You could see it on the paper but it wasn't very colorful. Matthew really liked painting with it though and as we painted we could smell cherries from the tea. Kinda fun.

One of our paintings. It kind of looks like a dinosaur...that's where some of the tea spilled. :) You can see, it didn't turn out very bright at all. Oh well.

He kept asking to paint all afternoon. I left it out so he could come back to it (with supervision) when we wanted. We had fun.