What is tea printing? The process behind every Teascarf Brooklyn design

The name raises a question most people don't expect to find themselves asking: what does it actually mean to print with tea?

The answer is more precise than the name suggests — and more interesting. Tea printed fabric, in the Teascarf Brooklyn sense, begins not on fabric at all. It begins on paper, with steeped tea bags, arranged by hand.

How the process works

Reed Slater brews tea bags and arranges them carefully on watercolor paper. The placement is intentional — the pressure of each bag, the direction it's set down, the way adjacent bags interact on the surface. The tea prints onto the paper. The marks accumulate. The composition builds slowly, layer by layer, decision by decision.

This is not a quick process. A finished piece can take days. The print shifts depending on the tea, the saturation, the time each bag sits on the paper. Nothing about it is mechanical.

When a piece is complete, Slater photographs it at high resolution — capturing every tone, every gradation, every mark the tea printed onto the surface. That photograph is then digitally printed onto fabric. Silk chiffon for lightness and drape. Silk-wool for structure and warmth. The printing process is selected for accuracy and archival quality, ensuring the fabric version is a faithful record of what happened on the paper.

Why the distinction matters

It would be easy to say that Teascarf Brooklyn prints tea onto fabric. That's not what happens. The fabric carries a photograph of an original work. The original exists on paper. The scarf is a high-fidelity edition of that original — not a craft product, and not a mass-produced pattern, but something in between: an artist made silk scarf in the truest sense of the phrase.

This matters because it changes what you're looking at when you hold one. The image wasn't designed in software. It wasn't drawn on a tablet or assembled from stock elements. It was made by hand, on paper, using a process that resists precision. You can see that in the result. The edges aren't clean in the way digital edges are clean. The color isn't flat. There's variation — the evidence of time and material and a specific person making specific decisions.

The origins of the practice

The process began after an accident. Slater fell from a roof, was in a coma, and returned to the world slowly. Making art with tea bags was part of that return — a practice that started simply and developed into something with its own logic and visual language. Tea printed fabric became the medium through which that language found its audience.

Every scarf in the collection carries that history, printed at archival quality onto silk.

The collection starts at $69. Each piece begins with tea bags, watercolor paper, and a careful hand.

Browse at teascarfbrooklyn.com.

— Reed Slater, Teascarf Brooklyn · May 26, 2026