Tea Bags Catalog Exceeds 60,006 Teabags on Colnect

We on Colnect are proud to announce that the charming Tea Bag Catalog on Colnect has now reached 60,006 Tea Bags! The catalog has progressed a lot over the years,  into a beautiful and well structured catalog, that now also works as a counterpart to its brother catalog, Tea Labels. With over a thousand tea bags added just in the last month, the catalog's growth rate, years after its creation, is impressive.

This achievement is made even more admirable when you consider it's all the result of the ever dedicated coordinator and founder of the category, Carine De Pauw [crookscarine]. The Teabag category has gotten help from great contributors, of course, but as the sole coordinator and editor of the category, Carine is the main grand orchestrator and executor of it all, maintaining 2 categories at once. Without her, no of this was possible.

Carine with a Colnect T-Shirt at a fai 

Carine is a serious collector of Stamps, Phonecards, Tea Bags, Tea Labels and Beer Coasters. She has been a Colnect member since 2005, when Colnect was still a website only catering to Phonecard collectors. Let's take a few moments to get to know her a little better.

- Carine, you are taking on both the Tea Bags and Tea Label categories on your own as the sole coordinator and editor for both categories. How are you managing that?

This works because I use all my free time to work on both catalogs. I try to add new teabags every day. This is only possible thanks to my contributors who are sending scans. Some of them also send me new teabags, so I can enlarge my own collection, because I don’t have much time to swap. Sometimes I get comments regarding mistakes in the catalog which help me edit the catalog. Therefore I would like to thank all my contributors.

The first one. when I’ve started in 2009, was Els Van Gastel [leeuwin] from the Netherlands. In October 2011 I saw beautiful teabags from Brooke Bond on Facebook from Marjoke. I’ve asked her if I could get the scans for Colnect. She agreed and from then on I’ve gotten a lot of new scans from her for the catalog.

Here you can see a picture of Marjoke and Emilienne, another member on Colnect. It is at an international fair at Rijkevorsel in November 2012, where I advertised Colnect.

Left to right: Emilienne, Carine and Marjoke, collector fair at Rijkevorsel, November 2012

Special thanks to all my contributors, without whom I would never have had 60006 bags in the catalog:
From the Netherlands - Els Van Gastel [leeuwin], Marjoke Rozier [marjatea], Veerle Daams [dragons], Jan De Graaf [Saturn] ,Cees Verbaan [Cornelis], Irene Ramp [teagirl], Christel Aerts [CIEV2004], Hillie Janssen-Kiers [hillie1956]
From Belgium: Geert Vinck [GeertVinck], Nancy Vergauwen [bambi]
From Denmark - Flemming Axelsen [axpro], Inge Nielsen [vinkel]
From Finland: Ljuba Brown [Zamppa]
From Germany: Jacklin
From Latvia: Ivan Dimitrov [ventspils]
From Spain: Manuel Faja I Riera [ttags]
From Indonesia: Dhanya Rahardjo [dhanya]

- What do you think of how the TB catalog and Colnect have changed over the years?
Since the start of the catalog there are some interesting changes. I think the variants are very useful, as well as the link to the corresponding Tea Labels.

In the future I would like to add many new teabags and also spend more time on the tea label catalog which I have started in January 2013.

- What kind of reaction do you get from Tea Bag collectors regarding the catalog?
Some collectors are very grateful and they say “You’re doing a great job”.

- Do you have a favorite teabag?
My favorite teabag is not just a teabag, it’s a puzzle from an English tea shop with 25 small tea boxes. It’s a present from my daughter.

Carine's favourite item on her the Tea Bag collection

We're delighted to have Carine on board the Colnect ship and happy to celebrate with her a double occasion, her recent birthday and her great accomplished creation, the Tea Bags catalog on Colnect. Many Tea Bag collectors around the world now benefit from her generosity with her time and enthusiasm to the collecting of Tea Bags.