How to Make Paper Look Old

So the other day my friend and I were working on this project when we decided that it would be fun to try and make our project look old and worn by slightly burning it. Neither of us were brave enough to actually do this on our own, so of course we went ahead and attempted it on our own anyway- whilst home alone, of all times. This of course was amongst one of our more brilliant ideas (we nearly burned the house down). WARNING: BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL!  

Anyway, if you want to try this, you’ll need:

– A strong cup of coffee. You can also substitute this with tea.

– A paintbrush

– A blow dryer

– A candle

– Paper, or whatever you plan make antique

1) Start by brewing a cup of coffee. If you want your page darker, make sure the coffee is pretty strong. While you’re waiting for the coffee to cool, start crumbling up your paper.

2) Taking your paintbrush, coat the whole paper in a layer of coffee.

3) Using a blow dryer, dry the page. If you don’t want to do this, you can always leave your papers out in the sun (though this is probably not wise to do in the current snowy weather, unless you’re aiming for an attractive half soggy, half frozen, extremely tattered effect- in which case, good luck to the person who intends to read your paper).

4) Once the paper is done drying, carefully (and from experience, I must stress: carefully) light a candle of some sort. Hold the candle so that it touches the paper and the page begins to catch on fire just a bit. Quickly blow out the flame once it has spread and burned the desired amount of paper. It’s important that you do this before the fire spreads too much and burns not only your whole project to smithereens, but also other things (again, speaking from experience…).

Just a side note, I don’t have a picture for this step as my friend and I were too stressed while doing this to stop and snap shots of our near disaster/ burning of the house. To fill in the emptiness of this picture-less step, here’s a photo of someone else doing a much better job of the burning:

5) Yay! You’re done. Hopefully your project will turn out to look something like this:

rather than this:

…maybe we burned it a bit too much…?