June marks the birthdays of two of my bestest buds, so it’s card-making season! For my friend Tal, who is a tea fiend, I decided to make a tea-cup birthday card, inspired by this DIY on Spoonful.

You will need:

• A4 card
• Patterned paper / wrapping paper of your choice
• Scissors / craft knife
• Twinings tea envelope
• String (I used some from an actual tea-bag)
• Staple (just one!)

Instructions:

Start by folding a piece of card in half, and drawing a tea cup shape on the card, making sure that the handle is at the fold. Cut out the cup shape, but make sure that you leave the fold at the handle uncut, so you have a hinge. If you’re uncomfortable free-handing the cup shape, here’s a template.

If you want a pattern on the cup, glue the open card to some coloured gift wrap and cut around the edges with a pair of scissors or craft knife. To create the pocket on the inside for the tea-bag, I used a mini cellophane bag and trimmed it down, using double-sided tape to secure it to the inside of the card, leaving the top open. You can then poke your tea-bag of choice into its compartment!

It looks effective to dangle a tea tag from the front of the card, as though tea is being brewed, and you can personalise this how you wish. For me, it has to be Twinings, so I changed the tag ‘Lady Grey’ to ‘Lady Lim’ (my friend’s surname) in InkScape. You can use any picture editing software to do this, or you can just pen a message like ‘Happy Birthday’ with a pen – whatever you fancy!

This was really easy to make, but also felt suitably personalised. Let me know what you think!