Jinny and I met way back in 2016 at The London Artisan Market, at the Truman Brewery off Brick Lane in East London. We regularly saw each other doing various markets and soon discovered we both lived in Tower Hamlets, loved filthy food and were obsessed with dogs, in particular Ham, Jinny’s Border Terrier who was only 2 at the time. We ended up doing so many markets together it made sense for us to share stalls to help spread the costs of the day and it also meant I could spend the whole day pretending Ham was my dog.
We are also both Etsy sellers. Jinny had joined the London Local Etsy Team (LoLo), which was focused on creating a network of like-minded people, offering support and organising craft and selling events across London. It wasn’t hard for Jinny to convince me to join too. Being self-employed makers can be lonely, so it was great to go to meetups and talk shop with people who really understood our day-to-day, share ideas and collaborate.
Soon business chat became baby chat when we both started the next chapter in our lives. We never imagined when we first met that we would be swapping morning sickness remedies and (accidentally) flashing our boobs at each other. Living locally meant we could support each other, especially with my family being in Australia, and it’s been lovely to see our babies grow together. There is a running joke that we often chat on several social media platforms rather than talk to each other on the phone and we spend more time with each other than our husbands (pre lockdown obviously).
When lockdown hit, all our regular baby activities closed and we both finished maternity leave, talks of a collaboration started. Jinny mentioned that her best seller was her tea bag tidies and suggested that I put my Tea-Rex on one. A bit of back and forth and the Time for Tea-Rex design was born. Tea-Rex has had slight makeover from my original design, including an eye lift, veneers and a manicure. In my original illustration Tea-Rex is holding a plain tea-cup, it was replaced with Jinny’s Black Quadrangle mug. The play on words is a fusion of Tea-Rex with Time for Tea, another of Jinny’s tea bag tidy designs.
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| Original Tea-Rex illustration | Time for Tea-Rex illustration |
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Having both spent the past 18 months consumed with babies and the COVID-19 pandemic, working together has been a great escape and distraction from everything.
We hope you love our new tea loving friend as much as we enjoyed creating him.
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