At the beginning of this semester my dad bought me an outrageous amount of delicious Harney & Sons tea. He bought a variety of great flavors including, but not limited to, Passion Fruit, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast, Black Currant, Darjeeling, Hot Cinnamon Spice (my fave!), Green, Jasmine Green, Egyptian Chamomile, among others. The first thing I noticed about them, before even trying them, was that all the different colors of the different envelopes were just fabulous. Pink, brown, green, red, many shades of blue, yellow... So I decided I would open the envelopes very carefully when I was going to brew myself some tea, and maybe some day I'd make something interesting with all the colorful bags left over. Time went by and I saved many, many envelopes (I drink an average of 3-4 cups of tea a day, sometimes 10, sometimes 1).
In addition to my fondness of these beautiful colors, I have a fondness for Origami, the Japanese at of folding paper.
One Sunday afternoon I decided to combine both of these likings. This is what I made:
OK, this last one might me blunt advertising, but the Origami creations are cool nonetheless, aren't they?
As I was cutting and folding the pretty foil-lined paper, I realized that on the back of each envelope was a stamp that signified that the Harney & Sons company was a member of something called
1% For The Planet, which is a growing global movement of 1290 companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of 2,074 environmental organizations worldwide. I thought they might appreciate the fact that I found this interesting way of recycling their product so I sent them a picture of my Origami creation (by the way, the geometric shape is called an Icosahedron). I got a response from who I guess was the woman in change of responding to fan mail or questions. She told me that she loved it and was forwarding my email and the photo to Mike Harney (one of the sons in Harney & Sons!).
"Wow! What a superb creation! Thank you for sharing this with us. I'm sharing your email with John and Mike Harney. This is the best kind of recycling!
When you're ready to order tea, give me a call and I'll include one of our teabag or wrapped sachet sampler cubes at no charge."
He responded pretty quickly:
Paloma,
Thank you for the photo. It is very nice. I am glad to see you Williams students are always studying! My brother graduated over 30 years ago, and I am pretty sure he did not always study!
You should come down some time and get a tour of our factory, and catch a bite at our restaurant.
We are just over an hour south.
I was wondering if we can use the photo on our Facebook site?
Please let me know.
Best Regards,
Mike HarneyI sent him some better pictures and, eventually, they made it to the Harney & Sons Facebook fan site.
That is the story of how I became an avid supporter of saving your tea envelopes and a freelance Harney & Sons promoter. It's really good tea!
