Five Paper Aging Techniques

Doily I love the look and feel of old, weathered paper that I find in antique stores and estate sales. There is so much history within each page and nature gives the paper such a beautiful aged look. In trying to recycle as much as possible, it’s nice to apply some aging techniques to regular recycled paper instead of buying paper with the same look. You can use an out-of-date atlas buried in your glove box, scrap pieces of graph paper, sheet music, or your daily newspaper. Here are five paper aging techniques using everyday household materials you can apply to recycled paper to give you a great, aged effect!

  1. Over at Me vs the House, learn how-to use ordinary tea to age paper.
  2. On Curbly I found another project using coffee instead of tea. Either the coffee or tea method would work really well with newspaper.
  3. Go Make Something has a great project using only lemon juice and heat. I can really see this technique working great on a piece of recycled sheet music!
  4. Howcast has a great video tutorial employing coffee, tea, and lemon juice.
  5. In the first of five posts by Michelle Clement, learn how to use walnut ink to age your recycled paper. *Bonus* if you want to make your own walnut ink instead of buying it, use this great tutorial showing you how to make it and how beautiful it can look!

The possibilities are endless when it comes to applying these techniques to recycled paper. Aging paper can be a fun and simple project to add a beautiful aged look to your work. Which method is your favorite? I would love to see your aged paper and what techniques you used! Feel free to leave links to your projects in the comments.

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