Been reading a bit about people making tarps out of tea bags, so I thought I'd give it a go. First you need a tea bag. Best part here is that you don't need to waste one, can use used ones. I tried two different types, the Lipton brand being the older style with the metal staple, and the Dilmah, which uses more glue. The glued one I found yielded a lot less material. The Liptons bag unfolded quite well, it appeared to have some sort of water-soluble glue, so it comes apart quite well, although not in the teacup due to very clever design. The small one on the left is cut out of the Dilmah bag, the other two are Liptons I then tried using scenic glue on it to give it more rigidity, this is 50:50 Mod Podge glue and water, this didn't seem to do much. So I tried with the artists acrylics. This was much more successful. It resulted in a tarp that got shape when you rubbed it with your finger along an angle, and it kept this shape. Different colours were used for different tarps. The older (but still recent in rail terms) poly tarps were blue, with the newer heavier duty ones being silver. I will paint some up in rail colours for my next work with these. For ropes I used cotton thread with paint run down it to give it stiffness, otherwise it is too hard to handle. I tried re-using the thread from the teabag but it ended up looking too coarse. I stuck it to the underside with superglue. Cheers Tony
And since today is the 1 year anniversary of the giant Berowra hailstorm I thought I would model a roof tarp. Here it is, on the roof of the one house in Gundah Junction. One year on and there are still people here with tarps on their roofs.Now we are looking at another catastrophic bushfire danger day too.
