I should perhaps mention that, not being satisfied with the tea staining of the checkered "ivory-like" grips, I gave them a further treatment with hot coffee (heated to near boiling a few times in the microwave, as I had done with the tea) and am much more pleased with their appearance now.
Unfortunately, most photos seem to really "wash out" the tone of the grips ...which is the case in the above picture. However, I took some photos with a sheet of white paper as a background ... although I had to color-correct the resulting images a bit for overly bluish tones, this composite gives a pretty good idea of the actual appearance of the grips to the eye, now: