Friday tea report

  • aug24-teapot.jpgIt’s a rainy morn­ing, thank good­ness. And the tem­per­a­ture feels like the high-70′s, a sign that just maybe we’ve turned that cor­ner. The sus­pense was killing us, but it looks like we might just make it out of the ghastly, muggy dead of sum­mer after all.

    The dog didn’t want to go out this morn­ing. Wet weather brings out the Val­ley Girl in her and, stand­ing out­side with me, she had the sniffy, dis­gusted look of a prom queen that doesn’t want to break a nail. But I made us stay out because I had a cer­tain photo I wanted to take, plus it helps me get a few thoughts together before I have to start my work.

    It’s a med­i­ta­tive day, a day that means … yes, I think I can see my way clear to mak­ing a sec­ond pot of tea. Whirl­wind days have to start with cof­fee — a rainy day can start with tea. So I fill the ket­tle and turn it on.

    And I think it’s a day for the good Cey­lon, brought to me all the way from Sri Lanka by a friend (thanks, Jamie!). It’s a tricky tea to get right — so fine-ground that I can eas­ily make it too strong. So, easy does it on the time it steeps, and care­ful with the amount. And just the right amount of sweet­ener (which for me means one mil­ligram less than the amount that turns it into one giant sugar cube).

    Are we ready for our Fri­day now? Then let’s begin.


    Related posts:

    1. The weather report
    2. Life report — good news and bad
    3. Cold as a bat’s underpants
    4. Bright Fri­day and my wooden heart
    5. 6:40 am

    August 24th, 2007 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 08.24.2007

    Oooh, that sounds lovely! Enjoy the tea!

  • DebD

    This was the per­fect blog entry as I just bought a new teapot!

    I actu­ally enjoy rainy weather and hav­ing tea with it sounds won­der­ful. Of course, I don’t have a dog I have it sit out­side with.

    Hope the tea turned out just right.

  • Grace

    I can report that the tea was per­fect. The stand­ing out­side was the pro­logue to tea-time. I don’t have any­where good to sit out­side, and I don’t think I could put up with the dog’s expres­sion if I made her stay out­side for long.

    So it was sit­ting next to me as I typed, which is why I couldn’t resist draw­ing it (with the tea cosy on, in case you were won­der­ing why it has such a strange shape).

  • Word­mama

    Love the teapot draw­ing — can I use it as wall­pa­per? and what did you use to get the lovely rain-drip color?

  • Grace

    Wall­pa­per: Surely. I’ll send you the file.

    The draw­ing is a sketch I scanned in; the col­or­ing is Pho­to­shop. The color was manip­u­lated over the whole image to give that “antiqued” look (although it started out on a buff-colored paper anyway).

    Then I came up with a cou­ple col­ors, set the opac­ity low (so that they’d be very light) and set the Brush option to Darken. That Darken option makes it so you can paint and not oblit­er­ate the darker lines. So it’s kind of like adding a wash if you were paint­ing, only more accurate.

    As for that squig­gly pic­ture box, you use the lasso tool, set the anti-alias feather option to some­thing like 10 pix­els (for a 72 pixel image) draw a squig­gly bor­der around the image, invert it, delete it (with a white back­ground color) and touch up the out­side edges with white paint.

    I have a feel­ing that some of the pre­ced­ing sounded com­pli­cated, but it’s really pretty sim­ple stuff. And I like to pass along “recipes” in any case. :-)

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