The story of Wednesday’s Child begins with a mood board.
A friend has been on a stash-busting kick, and said over-arching project has produced many awesome things. The gnomes that are heading out over the of the week are one, and the scarf that the mood board was created for is another.
My friend had asked if I’d be interested in bundling some of her don’t-have-a-specific-home fibrecrafts with tea for nifty gift sets. I thought this was a capital idea, and an amazing offer.
The interplay of colours and the sense of the mood board gave me an idea for a tea. Nothing truly solid, at that point, but once the weaving of the scarf commenced and I saw in progress pictures, I was scribbling down notes on possible foundations, flavours, and the underlined word “Stark.” (In this case provoked by the two sides of the weaving, as the underpinning shifted from dark to light.)
I’ve rarely had such glee in creating a tea. Don’t get me wrong, there is always joy in it, but this one was born out of a type of collaboration that I have always wanted but not had in a very long time.
There was a brief window in high school when I had a friend who would come over, bringing art supplies, and she’d draw or paint while I communed with the grand piano that graced my grandparents’ living room.
I loved to see the art that swirled out of the music, and sometimes what she put down on paper would inform where the improvisation went, or would help me to choose the next piece to practice.
Reading the books in the Sword & Sorceress series (yes, I know about MZB), rampaging through the Merovingian Nights, the concept of Wild Cards, Flint’s expansion to the Weberverse and the 1600s series – all of these things gave me this quiet hopeful goal that someday I would create something cool enough for others to want to play in it, too.
Collaboration, inspiring/being inspired. Working with others to create linked art, in whatever framework. It’s like a mixed media jam session and I love it.
Wednesday’s Child didn’t have the true level of back and forth for me to feel like I had given back as good as I’d gotten, but it reminded me of what is possible, and there’s a restoration in that.
The name popped to mind alongside the tea idea. An old singsong poem that gets stuck in my head from time to time, but in a kids-with-a-jump-rope way rather than ground-in-for-the-lessoning.
And it fit. At least in part because there’s a fair likelihood that my friend and I are both constitutionally Wednesday’s Children, no matter the actual day name of our births.
So, with this tea, I salute the spirit of collaboration, and the joy found in it, as well as all the oddlings out there who can hold compassion and critical thinking in the same space.
Now for the basics:
Organic Ingredients: Keemun Black Tea, Elderberries, Coconut Flakes, Cornflower, and Black Pepper
Batch Size: 5.7 ounces, approximately 161 grams, 55+ servings
Options: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 Teabag Sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag))
For the moment, this tea can only be found in the store on this website.
