Quick and Easy DIY Reusable Tea Bags (From a Sleeve)

Make these easy, 5-minute DIY reusable tea bags for loose leaf teas! They’re quickly made from repurposed sleeves and are the perfect use for old baby onesies and small t-shirts.

Last time, I showed you how I made my 5 minute drawstring pouches from t-shirt sleeves.  With my son growing up, I have had a lot of material to work with, repurposing a lot of his baby clothes.  As you have seen here on the blog, I used the front part of his shirts and onesies to make a baby clothes quilt.  The back side of his shirts and onesies, conveniently became easy cloth wipes.

What about the sleeves?

I couldn’t let them go to waste, and made them into drawstring pouches.

Baby clothes, of course, are tiny, so the pouches that can be made from them are also just as tiny.  Finding a use for them seemed a bit trickier than for a bigger pouch.  As luck would have it, though, I had a lot of organic cotton onesies that my son had outgrown, and had an idea for what I wanted to do with them.

I decided that the perfect use for the sleeves was quick and easy DIY reusable teabags.

You don’t have to use organic cotton, of course, but I felt better using it, especially for something food-related like a teabag.  I decided that as long as I was at it, I would buy some organic cotton cording for the drawstring.

Smaller onesies became individual-sized teabags while larger ones were perfect for infusing tea in a small teapot.

These are made exactly like my other drawstring pouches.  You just have to turn the sleeve inside out, sew across the bottom, and flip it right side out again. Since most of the onesie sleeves were pretty straight, I really only had to make that one seam at the bottom of the teabag when using the tinier sleeves.  For bigger sleeves, with more of an angle, I sewed down the side and the bottom, just like before.

Once the sewing is done, all that is left to do is to make holes in the tube seam for the cording, and to pass the cords through.  You can see exactly how it is done in my post about making drawstring pouches.

I have left mine plain and practical, but if I were to give these away as gifts or party favors, I would probably make little tags for the ends of the cording, that would hang outside of the teapot or cup.  A felt heart or other type of tag could be sewn right where the cords get knotted together.

Reusable teabags are a great alternative to buying disposable ones.  You can grow your own herbs to dry for making your own herbal teas, or can buy ready-made loose leaf teas.  In either case, you are wasting less, and could even be saving yourself a little bit of money.

Having so many little sleeves lying around meant that I could make quite a few teabags ahead of time, to have them ready when I want to make myself a cup of tea.  When I’m done, I flip the bags inside out, emptying the tea leaves into the compost bin, and I throw the teabags into my dishwasher.  I’m lazy like that.  You could hand wash them too, though.

I love these because they work perfectly to filter out the little bits of tea, but don’t prevent them from infusing into the water.

So, now it’s your turn… I hope you make them and love them as much as I do!