Since I’ve started learning about tea, I’ve been focusing mostly on the tea leaves. But I’ve recently started on a tea-adjacent path: teaware.
Teaware has been something that I’ve been wanting to get into for some time, but never dared to take the first step because there were just too. many. choices.
Let me introduce you to the three new members of my tea family:
This cute like pot + cup set is the one I mentioned in my post about Damro Labookellie’s Golden Tips. I’ve been using it at work for the past couple of weeks and it has changed my tea drinking at work! I’m finally able to steep my tea gongfu style AND do multiple steeps. It’s a lot more fun for me this way and I’m really enjoying things.
Apart from this new pot and cup set, I’ve also fallen in love with these vintage teacups:
I got them from Vintage Garden in the Tropics and I gotta say, the blue-green one was the reason why I made a carousell account after resisting for so long. I’m really looking forward to learning more about these vintage teacups – apparently the backstamps are used to date things so I foresee myself needing to read up on that!
If you’re looking for teacups and other vintage China and you’re in Singapore, I’d recommend taking a look at Vintage Garden in the Tropics! Her stuff is beautiful (and so is her instagram) and she is such a friendly person! I had a lot of fun having tea with her on Saturday and it really inspired me to look a bit more closely at vintage tea cups.
Side note: Here’s another new thing – backdrops! As you can tell, the photos that I take (the tea photos) aren’t the nicest so I got these to try and make my photos a little better. After I get into the rhythm for tea photos, I’ll try to see what I can do for my book review feature images – I’m using free stock photos right now but I’d love to try more book photos!
So that’s my mini-update on where things are in my tea journey! I’m still really enjoying the tea leaves but I’ve also started on this (potentially financially ruinous) side-journey of teaware. I really like vintage tea cups, but my tea-brewing preference is for the modern gongfu-style, so I hope to be able to do a East meets West-type of tea party one day. There’s also a teaware class that I’m hoping to attend so you can expect more posts about teaware coming up.
If you’ve got any recommendations on where to start learning – either websites or books – please let me know. I’m all ears!
Featured Image: Photo by Me
That teal cup is to DIE for!!! It’s so lovely!
I LOVE that teal cup <3
Allow some wiggle room in your budget for more cupboards / chests of drawers to house the new gear in. Trust me on this… 😉
Sounds like good advice! I just need to find the space for the cupboards 😉
When I was wondering about precisely that problem I asked if we really needed so big a fridge as well as a freezer.
Didn’t go down too well… 😀
Love the teal teacup! And I really want to get a gaiwan this year. I feel like I’ve i miss out on the complexities of some of the teas I taste when I brew western style.
The teal was the first one I fell in love with! And yes, I agree that the two ways of brewing produce very different results – for straight teas there’s nothing like gongfu-style brewing (for me, anyway)