Reading The Tea Leaves | Fortune Telling Tea Cups
The art of reading tea leaves has been around for centuries. Also known as Tasseography, the enjoyable art of fortune telling by interpreting the patterns that tea leaves make in a teacup is a very popular tea party game. Almost everyone loves the fun of trying to ‘see’ signs and symbols in their tea cup.
All that is needed to read the tea leaves are tea cups, saucers and a pot of loose leaf tea! Tea bags are not suitable for tasseography, even if torn open, the leaves in tea bags are just too fine to make discernible patterns and symbols. There are specially decorated vintage china tea cups available with symbols for tea leaf readers and these cups are highly collectable in their own right. They are mostly decorated with symbols or playing cards and came with instructions for interpreting the symbols. We have several of these vintage tea cups which are available to hire, with instructions, for tea parties. However any tea cup with a white or light colored interior will work perfectly too.
~ Vintage Fortune Telling Tea Cups ~
Pour the tea into your cup, ensuring not to use a tea strainer and drink as usual leaving a small amount of dregs in the bottom of the cup. Swish the dregs around for a few seconds and then turn the cup upside down onto the saucer. Move the cup from the left side three times in a circle and then turn it over.
Generally, the tea leaf symbols closest to the rim are events in the near future and the closer to the bottom of the cup the tea leaves, the further away the event will be. There are several books available on the subject that are easy to use or you can download instructions from many good websites. If you Google ‘reading the tea leaves’, you will find dozens of great websites and blogs that give charts of symbols and their meanings, as well as instructions and tips. Print these onto pretty paper and have copies on hand for your guests to read their own tea cups.
Tea leaf reading is so much fun for an afternoon or high tea and is a lot more popular than energetic games such as croquet or bocce. Guests seldom ever feel like running around playing games after a substantial afternoon tea!
