Visit A Whimsical Bohemian for other One World One Heart participants.

For this part of the ride, you’re visiting me (Eva Buchala, Lady Artisan) here in Texas. It’s been a balmy 60 to 70 degrees here in San Antonio for the past several days and most of us South-Central Texans are happy to be in shorts again! Take your jackets off, kick your shoes off and dangle your feet over the sides of the carpet as you join me for some bookbinding and sculpting fun. We’ll be servin’ up some ribs, tamales, chili and refreshing iced tea (sweet or unsweet, your choice) for refreshments.

Rules for the giveaway are simple:

1. Leave one comment on this post to receive an entry into the drawings (yes, that’s plural).

2. Make sure your comment includes your name and contact info so I can find you if you win.

3. Wander around and check out my other posts, Flickr, my website, etc. Feel free to leave comments on other posts, too

4. Send your comment in before midnight CST on February 14 (Happy Valentine’s Day!) so you’ll be included in the drawings.

5. Enjoy yourself! Don’t forget to pick up your snacks before the Magic Carpet heads off to it’s next location.

Entry into the drawing must be submitted before midnight Central Standard Time on Sunday, February 14, to be included. I will be drawing the winners (yes, that’s plural) on the morning of Monday, February 15, and announcing them during that day. I’ll probably use a random number generator this year.

Now to the good stuff–the giveaways. I’m offering up four leather matchbook notepads (refillable) and one Sheepicle–a small sculpted sheep, this one is ready for Valentine’s Day. I will randomly (of course) pick a winner for each item and post that information on Monday, February 15. If the winner of an item doesn’t respond by midnight on Tuesday, February 16, I will choose a new winner for that item. On to the items:

First up are the matchbook notepads. I came up with this idea one day looking at the smaller pieces of leftover leather from making books and wondering what I could do with them. I’d seen the matchbook notepads on Etsy, usually for promotional purposes, but thought it might be neat to have a nice, mini leather notepad to carry in a purse, pocket or bag (I’m always searching for note paper in my purse). The downside to making a matchbook notepad out of leather is that the materials cost way too much to sell them as inexpensively as the paper ones, of course. Plus, I can’t make one without wanting to carve, decorate, dye, etc., so the time involved would be a bit more. Solution? Make them refillable. So, paying more won’t matter because you can simply get one and refill it over and over.

The first matchbook is a cute little Piggy on a Spring green background. The notepad is made from hand-dyed leather and has a cute little pink piggy brad on the cover with two matching pink brads in the back. Filled with 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

The second matchbook is Patriotic. This one sports a white start with red dots on it gracing a deep blue background. Again, the leather is hand-dyed and the brads on the back for this one are red stars. Paper inside is also scrap drawing paper, 16 pages.

The third matchbook is this Little Black Notepad–a simple and classic black leather with lovely little pearl hearts trimmed in gold (not real pearls, not real gold, just in case someone wondered). The paper included is 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

The final matchbook I’m giving away is a perfect Valentine’s item, although it’s never out of style to carry your heart with you. This matchbook is a thicker leather with a hand-carved heart on the cover, dyed red on a pink background, the back sports two sparkly, glittery red hearts for brads. The paper inside is, once again, 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

And the final giveaway item this year is a little sculpture in a series I’m calling the Sheepicles. This little guy is terribly cute and he’s holding a heart that says “Love” on it. It’s called “I Heart Ewe” and is a hand sculpted sheep in air-dry clay. I painted it with black, white and red artist acrylics. He’s looking forward to sharing his love with you…

Leave a comment. You’re welcome to tell me which item you’d prefer if you win but I can’t guarantee to accommodate everyone.

If you like the Sheepicle here, don’t forget to stop by the Art Dolls Only blog where the team is giving away 17 (yes, SEVENTEEN) doll and art items. I made a Sheepicle for that giveaway as well called “Smooch.”

Comments are moderated for those posting for the first time so if you don’t see your comment right away, it probably still needs to be approved.

Red. I’ve been using Eco-Flo for dying the leather–they’re water-based colors (dyes and highlighters) for leather sold by Tandy–and their Scarlet is a nice, rich red. Their All-In-One stain and finish is awful but the dye and highlighters are pretty nice, although getting a really even spread on the dyes isn’t always easy unless you’re using a darker color. For me, they’re perfect, though, because I much prefer the less even look anyway.

These designs always start out simple and then grow into rather complex and involved projects that have me researching something online and spending more time than I ought on detailing a piece. On the upside, I find a lot of really fascinating websites that I never knew existed. For instance, e-Leo, which is an online archive of da Vinci’s diaries and papers (you have to register with this site for access–I imagine they’re protecting copyrights with that–but it’s well worth it).

Although da Vinci is well before the Victorian era, where most Steampunk seems to live, the inventions and ideas he came up with fit rather neatly with the “feel.” And, considering that the mechanical clock was invented in the 13th or 14th century (at least a century before Leonardo), it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch for me to land on da Vinci at least once while working on one of these.

Truthfully, though, the idea came because I had some stray black marks show up on the inside of the journal and I didn’t want to dye the inside covers this time, so I started thinking about what kind of design I could do on the inside to incorporate my mistakes rather than cover them up. It started me thinking about some of da Vinci’s journal pages with the sketches and mirror writing, so I decided to do something along those lines.

I’m not going to show the whole of the inside covers yet…once I’ve sold the book and the customer has a chance to look them over and “decipher” them, I’ll post them on my blog.

As for the rest of the book, black is such a nice complement to red, so I went with black velvet for the spine and black suede for the strap. The clasp/closure is part of the watch band from the watch cover I used on the front (the bottom cover with the clockwork gears). It makes an interesting closure and works surprisingly well.

The molded decorations that help hold the watch face  and watch cover in place are made with Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay), then painted with blackened bronzer. I used molds for part of the decoration, a leather stamp for part of it and did the rest by hand.

The paper is a mix of ivory and beige pastel paper, tea-stained watercolor paper and some naturally aged Arches watercolor paper that I got at an estate sale. The clockwork design, this time, is simpler than usual. If I’m not careful, I can spend literally days laying out a good clockwork design, so I opted for simple to reduce the time spent. Which turned out to be a good idea after I added the da Vinci aspect.

As usual, these journals give me a chance to practice my storytelling. They always seem to have some kind of “history” behind them, which is part of the appeal for me, personally. I enjoy coming up with the background to explain what their purpose is and what kind of person might have owned them. For the background on this one or if you think you can’t live without it, check my Etsy shop.

And, finally, a picture of the book “in action.” I know the listing says that the sellers have never tried it out but how can anyone resist having a couple of “extra” hours to get some things done?

My Steampunk designs have been relying on combining lots of metal with paper and leather. I’m very particular about how I place the watch parts inside a watch cover on my main designs. I am not quite skilled enough yet (and I haven’t really had the time or made it) to figure out how to make a clockwork design on one of these journals that actually functions, but I like them to LOOK like they might work or might have worked at some point in time. My eventual goal is to make some that have functioning parts, gears that work, a crank that turns, etc., but I’m not quite there yet.

One of the hardest aspects of all this is securing the watch parts, metal tubing and other base metal pieces to the leather or book board. I can’t wrap wire around everything to make it stay put so I’ve been relying on some good, strong glues (JB Weld, for instance) that work fine but sometimes leave me thinking that I could be doing something further to secure these pieces. I’ve even gone so far as to try soldering (on my last TDB, I used quite a bit of soldering) but will likely not do that again very often since I found my control of the solder was pretty lame.

Well, this small Steampunk matchbook notepad that I’ve been sharing pictures of throughout this post has given me a new vision. I had to carve a circle in the leather–just enough for the watch crystal/cover to sit down in it and be secure. The clockwork design was glued onto the natural leather in the center of the circle and then I glued the watch cover over it and attached the copper tube on the outside. The JBWeld worked great for holding things in place but the design of this particular notepad is different than a solid front cover with book board under the leather. The matchbook has to open and close which, of course, bends the leather. As soon as I opened and closed the book once, I could see a problem–the top of the watch cover was coming lose because of the folding/bending of the leather. NOT a good thing.

I’d never had this particular situation come up before, of course, so it was the first time I had to figure out a solution for it. Which might explain why it had never occurred to me that I could use Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay that sticks to EVERYTHING) to help secure these metal parts to my books. But that wasn’t actually the epiphany. I started working with the clay, putting a snake of black clay around all the edges of the watch case (why not add extra security) and making a bigger snake at the top to help keep it from separating from the leather everytime the book was opened.

As I was working with the Apoxie Sculpt, adding some designs to the top portion that would be more visible, it hit me (yes, I’ll admit I’m a little slow sometimes). I can use the Apoxie Sculpt for attaching the clockwork parts and metal pieces AND I can sculpt with them a bit so it’s decorative! Ok, so it’s not much of an epiphany but it was a pretty good one for me since it solves my securing/attaching concerns and it adds some great design elements to my books.

Which brings me to this little beauty which will be going in my Etsy shop soon. I’m calling it the Clockwork Kladde (a German word that’s supposed to mean book, notebook or jotter). It’s a technological wonder–designed to take notes for you automatically. Of course, it doesn’t function anymore so you’ll have to take those notes yourself, but it sure looks cool.

Everyone knows that the first and most important key to selling online is to take good photos. Buyers are likely to be making a decision to purchase something based mainly on the photos you share and, only secondarily on the description you give. If you don’t catch their eye with the photo, then you’ve already lost the sale. I’ve recently realized how important this visual element is while doing some online shopping myself. I find myself hesitant to buy anything online if there isn’t a photo in the listing showing me what I’m buying. I’m talking about more mundane things, as well–not just artwork/handcrafted items (which is a no-brainer when it comes to needing photos) but also for things like supplies I buy online. Eyelets, for instance. They don’t normally look any different from one manufacturer to the next. Other than color or size, do I really need to see a photo? But I still find myself more willing to put those items in my cart if there’s an image associated with the description. I find myself going back more regularly to the online companies with color photos in their shops rather than the ones that have simple text listings of their items or even black and white sketches (although American Science & Surplus is one exception to this rule).

I’m not going to even pretend that I can tell you how to take better pictures from a technical perspective. Heck, I don’t even have the technique part down myself–I use the flash on my camera way too much because I’m too lazy to actually put my head into setting up a proper lighting and background set in my current studio.

What I really want to talk about here are teaser photos. Which is my name for those abstract detail shots that a seller uses as their main photo in their listing. The idea is to show just enough of the item to catch a buyer’s attention and make them wonder what the rest of the piece looks like. Do they always work? Probably not. And I’ve never done any in-depth, or even cursory, studies to see how effective they are. I have seen that my items tend to get more views if I use a more dramatic main shot for the listing rather than a full item photo showing the whole piece at once. I think that for some items, it’s more effective to show the whole thing and for some items, people will be more apt to check it out if they can’t quite see it all.

So, yes, I’ve been sharing various detail shots that I took of my new Steampunk Journal. One thing I do for my abstract shot is take several different ones. When I first started doing the detail shots, I would take one or, at the most, two different details. Occasionally, I got really lucky and came up with something excellent, like this shot of my Serenity journal (which could almost be considered Steampunk–velvet, leather, and a watch crystal on the cover):

I’ve found that I don’t get lucky that often so I started taking numerous detail shots to make sure I get at least one that I like. In this case, I like almost all of them but decided against a couple of them because they showed too little. The corner detail shots have too little of the book in them and I don’t feel like they inspire people to actually go look at the item to see the rest.

The front cover at an angle seemed to have too much in it–too much of the overall book and too much background. So I decided against using that one. I finally opted for one of the spine shots because it showed a little bit of a hinge rod, some of the copper sheet and hinges, a bit of the copper tubing and a tiny sliver of the clockwork design on the cover. The background is subtle enough to not get in the way.

But, depending on how long this one hangs around my shop and studio, I may switch out the detail shots to see how they affect the number of views I get.

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Looking for something you can buy to get your name into the BEST drawing this holiday season? I’ve just added some new personalized journals to my shop.

I’m also working on another Steampunk journal–this one a little larger than the last. It’s coming along nicely and I’m hoping to be able to list it sometime this weekend. Here’s a teaser:

I don’t remember how I initially found out about this call for entries  (probably the Etsy forums) but, I remember scrambling to submit a couple of items, scrambling to get the release forms together, and not having much time to do it all. I think when I found out about it, the deadline was almost upon me.

And then I kind of forgot about it until I got an email from Garth earlier this month letting me know that at least one of my submissions had been accepted and the book would be published soon. Happy Dance time!

At the beginning of the year, I was drowning in a studio full of THINGS, STUFF, and all those bits and pieces that I just KNEW I could use someday. I was keeping almost everything. Mom needed matches once so she bought a ton of those little promotional boxes of matches from a flea market one weekend. I stole all the boxes and gave her the matches thinking I could make a book or something with them. I bought some high-dollar root beer (Virgil’s Root Beer) and could easily imagine a nice thick book with the Virgil’s box as the cover so I kept that. Coasters from restaurants I’d been to recently, a set of educational pictures on learning about weather from a garage sale, my mom’s cigarette boxes (books made from a cigarette box or made to fit in one), an antique school slate from the early 19th century….I was on a repurposing binge at the time. Although my work isn’t usually focused on environmentally conscious materials (I was using polymer clay for most of my work), I kept seeing books in everything, so I kept the materials in case I could figure out the time to actually work on these ideas.

One of the things I did get to were a series of paint chip notebooks. These were tiny little pamphlets that I made using some old paint chips I had in my studio from when we were thinking about repainting our room, painting the bathroom, and from when I did miniatures (paint chips are excellent for miniatures). I had quite a few of those strips with four colors on each strip so I cut them in half and folded them so there was one color on the front cover and a second color (tint or shade from the same strip) on the back cover. Did a quick pamphlet stitch using leftover paper from various books and other projects. And, voila! I had a tiny notebook.

Well, actually, I did quite a few of them at one time so I ended up with A LOT of tiny notebooks.

I had to get some more recently for a project I was working on so I’ll be making a few more of these. The originals sold out pretty quickly. I may keep these to send as little thank you gifts instead of selling them this time. Anyway, that was “one” of the items I submitted for the Creative Reuse book that was accepted.

The other item was a pretty cool mini book I made from a pair of leather gloves I found at a garage sale. They were lovely brown kid gloves in a size too small for a normal human to wear (ok, maybe there are some women with hands that small). The gloves were short gloves, right at the wrist, with a decorative strap and gold buckle on the back of each. I had to use both gloves to make one 3″ x 2″ book. I also used one of the straps and buckles to make a closure strap on the little journal.

Not only did this one make it in the book, but it’s on one of the pages that Amazon displays on their site. Maybe not quite as thrilling as having your item on the cover, but it’s cool enough for me. And I have two more pairs of gloves that I found at another garage sale…

I don’t have a copy of the book yet but you can bet I’ll be getting one soon. The other pieces I’ve seen included in the book look wonderful, so I’m definitely in good company and look forward to seeing it all in person.

The spine wasn’t as difficult as you might think. Truthfully, I hate doing limp bindings where the text block is sewn directly onto the cover/spine and there are no boards to stiffen the covers. I find it very difficult to sew the signatures in place along the spine that way, for some reason. I much prefer sewing onto tapes or simply sewing the text block together with a simple stitching pattern and then attaching the tapes or the spine reinforcement to the boards/covers as a whole. Much easier for me. But I really wanted to use copper mesh for the spine so I decided to do a rather simple sewing pattern to attach the signatures to the spine. I added the center embellishments separately from the text block sewing. The rivets came much later. The overall sewing wasn’t too difficult with no limp covers to get in the way.

Once I had the text block complete, including the spine, I worked on the covers. I already had a vague idea of making some kind of hinge to attach the covers to the spine/text block and was thinking I’d use rivets, copper tubing and, perhaps, leather hinges. Serendipity struck. A polymer clay group I’m on (CITY-o-Clay) sent through a couple of posts about making your own wire hinges and I knew that’s what I wanted to use for this book. I figured it wouldn’t be much problem to make the wire hinges and then use rivets to secure them to the covers and spine (ah, so naive).

My plan was to use leather on both covers and dye it a mellow tan color. I decided to do my corners a little different than normal. Usually I’ll trim off a triangle of leather at each corner so the leather is “mitred” together as evenly as possible on the inside corners. You get a slimmer corner that way. This time, I thought it would look better to simply fold the leather over on itself. I wanted the corners to look a little bulkier. The basic leatherwork was pretty straightforward. I had actually sketched out a design of the book earlier (see above photo) and had an idea of how I wanted to attach the clockwork embellishments but once I had the leather completed and stamped (but not dyed), I started laying out the parts to make sure the design would work. It did with just a bit of tweaking.

My biggest challenge with this piece was the clockwork designs. My problem is that I’m too anal to just take a bunch of gears and watch parts and glue them together in a somewhat artistic pile. I want the pieces to look like they work together, the clockwork to look like it just needs a bit of winding before it gears up and and you find yourself being transported back in time to meet Jules Verne. Which means that I spent a heck of a lot of time finding just the right gear or part to place next to the last one that was attached. It took quite awhile to find all the pieces that “fit” together properly.

I was very happy with the final piece. The book itself lies flat so sketching, journaling, drawing, painting (watercolor or acrylic should work) are all easy enough to do in this journal. The next one is definitely going to be larger.

This journal can be found in my Etsy shop along with the fun story I came up to explain its history.

Originally produced by a small, unknown manufacturer in southern Illinois called Stughmeier & Sons, this Temporal Displacement Book (TDB) is only one of seven TDB’s purchased from the company between 1842 and 1845. The day following the sale of the seventh TDB, the whole factory completely disappeared without a trace.

Each book was purchased by a separate individual in a private sales meeting made available by invitation only. The buyers were all chosen carefully for their adventurous spirits, interest in the unusual and fantastical, and, of course, for their obscene wealth.

This particular TDB that’s currently for sale is believed to be the first one made. It was purchased by Maximillian von Zeit, a close friend of the company owner, in June of 1842. Although von Zeit disappeared in the Fall of 1842, this book was recovered from his family’s estate earlier this year.

Unfortunately, the Time Displacement Unit (TDU) built into the book, is not currently functioning. But a resourceful individual may be able to restore it to working order. Seller is NOT responsible for personal, temporal or financial damage that may be caused by tampering with the TDU without sufficient knowledge or understanding of its workings.

Whether the TDU works or not, this is an excellent book to use as a personal or art journal. Apparently von Zeit used his TDB regularly to go back to 1842 and “erase” his journal entries, leaving plenty of space for someone else to chronicle their own adventures. Although his only living descendant, Joshua von Zeit, believes that it’s more likely his great-great-great-grandfather Maximillian actually went back to 1842 and stole a second book.

At the present time, the locations of the other six (seven?) TDB’s are unknown.

On a side note, the pictures of my journal also show off the small photo set I made using builder’s foam, scrapbook paper, and glue.

And boy was it a doozie. Definitely the biggest journal I’ve ever made before but I love the heft so I’ll probably do more this large at some indeterminate time in the future. I’ve been calling this journal the DAG journal because the person who commissioned it is in the Dark Artists Guild and she wanted an art journal to use for her guild-related pieces. The customer is one of may favorite dollmakers and all-around wonderful person, Michelle of The Studio at Crowhaven Farm.

She wanted a journal that “fit” the DAG feel–something that looked old, full leather cover with a skull (see the DAG website for the original picture) and the guild name on the cover. Plus the guild name on the spine. She also wanted straps and she wanted it BIG. Did I say “BIG?” I meant to say GINORMOUS. Seriously, she wanted 400 pages and she wanted paper that could be used for various art media plus adding embellishments, mementos, bits of fabric, inspirational things. In other words, paper that was heavy enough to handle gluing and attaching things to it, not just for drawing and painting. Did I mention that this is a THICK book?

I used three different kinds of paper: Fabriano Tiziano pastel paper, Canson Mi Teintes pastel paper and some Strathmore 400 series, cold-pressed watercolor paper. I started by tea staining all the paper (see my earlier post about the tea staining bonanza) followed by sewing the text block (sewn on tapes) and then started trying to figure out the cover.

My biggest concern was the straps. I’ve done straps and closures before on books, but never anything like this. We’d discussed options and I suggested using straps with buckles rather than having wrap-arounds. I thought buckles would look pretty cool with the overall style of the book and we could fit the skull on the cover without hiding it every time she used her straps to secure the book. Of course, I’m good at coming up with ideas that I then have to try and figure out the how-to of later. I went through several books I have on bookbinding, glanced through a few pictures online and tried to mentally engineer the straps while staring at the book boards and leather.

I actually seriously considered partially burying the end of each strap into the book board under the leather and leaving a slit in the leather to feed the length of strap through. I had a few concerns about doing this, though, like dying/coloring the straps, finishing the edges on them and pressing the book once the cover was attached without causing major indentations in the cover from the straps. I finally decided to go with the most straightforward method I could think of which was to use rivets and bury the underside of the rivet enough in the book board to make it flush with the surface so there wouldn’t be any “unsightly” bumps in the endpapers.

The first step was to prepare the straps and the cover, including carving the skull and lettering, punching the proper holes in the straps, cover, and boards and dying/coloring the leather. It was definitely a new experience for me carving a piece from a photograph. Coupled with the fact that the design was a bit more complex than my normal designs, and I found myself challenged quite nicely with this piece. I’m also rather happy with how the carving turned out.

Next step–varnish the cover. Some of the stain I use is water-based and, although “books + water” is never a good idea, it would be even worse to have the dye start wiping off if you got a little water on the cover (i.e., the mad dash through the rain to a meeting or your house), so I use a spray sealer for protecting the color on the cover.

After it was all dry and ready to go, I cut out indents on the inside of the book boards near the spine to match my tapes. I don’t always do this, sometimes sticking with the more basic method of casing in where the tapes are cut short and glued down to the text block and the endpapers are used by themselves to attach the text block to the cover. But, did I mention how THICK this book is? It’s pretty hefty and I figure it’ll need extra support so I decided to attach the tapes into indentations in the book board (so they don’t show as bumps under the endpapers) and then paste down the endpapers.

Normally I would paste the endpapers in right after gluing in the tapes but I still needed to attach the straps and I wanted to partially bury the rivet head on the inside of the book board, so I decided to put the book in the book press for a few hours first. I wanted to press the book before adding the straps because I wouldn’t be able to press it after without making some rather ugly impressions on the leather cover from the straps. I ended up pressing it for over 24 hours.

Next job was to add the straps. Putting the strap on the front cover was pretty easy. Single rivet, dig out a bit of board on the inside of the cover so the rivets are inset and put it all together. The back cover was almost as easy although I ended up adding a second rivet so the straps wouldn’t swivel around when they weren’t buckled. I put it all together, attached the endpapers and had myself a LARGE leather bound journal.

Picture of skull to be used on the front cover

The customer (the lovely Michelle Schaffer of The Studio at Crow Haven Farm) wants a BIG blank art journal for a particular guild she’s in, the Dark Arts Guild. The cover will have the skull and the name Dark Arts Guild hand carved into the leather (it’s a full-leather binding) with two straps above and below the carved design and old-fashioned looking brass buckles. The straps will be functional (wrapping from the front of the book to the back to keep it closed while buckled). She wants a whopping 400 pages, which is going to make this one thick book. I imagine I’ll be doing some serious reinforcing on the spine to make it sturdy enough for handling such a large book. And she’ll be adding embellishments, pictures and other inserts on many of the pages so I’m going to have to bulk up the spine, make sure there’s some extra swell in there so that the front doesn’t become too bulky as she fills up her journal.

And the pages are being tea-stained. Which what this post is actually about. Now I’m no expert in tea-staining, but I’ve done it a few times so I thought I’d share here how I like to tea stain my paper. It’s amazingly easy and only slightly messy, depending on how you actually do it. There are several methods I can think of. You can make a big batch of tea and immerse the paper in it, which, I imagine, would give you the most even coverage but probably isn’t very practical for large sheets of paper (I mostly use full-sized sheets of paper rather than scrapbook or letter size). You can make a bowl of tea and then simply use a brush to paint it onto the paper, which should also give you pretty even coverage although some areas would be slightly darker from overlap. The painting method is probably the quickest and simplest method I can think of and would work well no matter what size paper you use.

Close up of some tea-stained Arches Text Wove paper

My favorite method is to use the tea bag directly on the paper. I like the uneven look and the streakiness of some of the staining (evident in the picture above). You can also see some areas that look flecked and some with pretty darkened staining on them…I’ll include how I do that here (another very simple trick, as long as you have the proper materials on hand).

The first thing to do is gather your materials, of course. So what materials do we need for tea-staining paper? We need paper, tea bags, a bowl for soaking the tea bags, a towel to protect the table while you w0rk (possibly two depending on how large your paper is), some walnut ink crystals, and some mixed walnut ink (follow the instructions on the jar of walnut ink crystals to mix it up).

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As mentioned, I use large sheets for almost all of my paper, normally hand-tearing it to the size I want. The paper I favor is usually in the 19″ x 24″ size range but the Arches Text Wove comes in a sheet that’s a whopping 25.5″ x 40″ and is probably the largest paper I’ll ever use. I actually tear it in half before I start working with it.

Tea bags–doesn’t really matter what brand and, in fact, this last batch of staining I did had me using some leftover Lipton bags and some cheap store-brand bags. The store brand bags had more color to them but the Lipton bags were actually saved from my last round of staining. Meaning, I actually pulled all the bags that I didn’t use when I stained the paper (I soaked quite a few too many last time) and stuck them in the freezer. When I was ready to stain again, I pulled them out of the freezer and stuck them all in a bowl of hot water. They worked just fine, although they were a bit light in staining the paper.

Coffee grounds could conceivably work but I find them a bit harder to work with. Plus, it costs a bit more than tea does making your staining efforts a bit more expensive in the end. And, tea does such a great job, I’ve never felt the urge to do any coffee experiments.

I usually put a towel or two down to protect the table top, followed by overlapping sheets of newsprint, big enough to lay the paper on. I normally start with one stack of paper and tea stain directly on the top page, sliding that page over to a new pile once it’s done and moving onto the next page on the stack. Not only does it take up less space to do it that way, but every time you lay down the tea water on the top page, some of it is bound to get on the edges of the paper underneath, so you get some added unevenness in the stain.

If you look closely, you can see the staining on the edge of the paper.

My method is pretty simple although it can be a bit time consuming. I get my tea bags soaking first (by the way, I recommend getting the family size tea bags–it’s the only size I’ve ever used and I can’t imagine how small a regular size tea bag would be) so the water gets nice and dark. Set up my work area with towels, materials, and paper. Once everything’s in place, I just take a tea bag out of the water, gently squeeze it (but not too much because the stain is darker and more uneven if you have a lot in the bag), and then spread it onto the paper. Sometimes I use a circular motion, sometimes I just go in whatever direction covers the paper the best.

I literally use the tea bag almost like a sponge and rub it all over the paper, sometimes dipping in the water again and gently squeezing it out. It’s an interesting balance between pressing the bag hard enough to lay down a good bit of tea water and being gentle enough with it that it will last for more than one side of a sheet. If the paper is rough enough or you press hard enough or you hit the edge of a sheet (paper can slice skin so it can certainly slice tea bag paper at the right angle), then you can break the bag or make holes in it very quickly. My personal challenge is to use a bag as long as possible before it’s too broken to function anymore as a “sponge.” I can sometimes get up to one side on three sheets of paper done before I have to give up the tea bag as a lost cause but I’ve also had them break on me almost as soon as I started using them.

As I complete a page, I set it aside, piling the pages on top of one another as I go. This does a couple of things–again, it saves space and it also does a little double staining for you since the backside of the paper you set on top is going to soak up some of the tea water. I usually leave some pretty big pools of tea sitting on the paper to soak in which gives a bit more color depth in those areas and add to the unevenness.

The areas where the tea water pools leave darker stains.

Regardless of how long a tea bag lasts, don’t just toss it as soon as the grounds start coming out. Keep using that baby and smearing those tea grounds around because it adds some streaking into the mix. If you take slightly damp tea grounds on a piece of paper and rub them into the paper with just your fingers, you can get some delicate streaking on the paper. Perhaps not the best picture, but the darker streaks pretty much in the center of the picture are from hand smearing the damp tea grounds.

Streaks made with damp tea grounds.

Works even better when you’re using a tea bag and rubbing quite a few tea grounds into the paper.  The staining frequently gets lighter as it dries but the streaking and unevenness is still quite visible, even after it’s dry.

Check out those streaks.

So, not only is a broken tea bag still good for staining, it’s also great for adding a little extra distressing into the overall antiquing look. As a tea bag gets too weak for me to use it anymore, instead of just tossing it in the trash (or dumping it on the counter to throw away later), I set it on one of the pages that I’ve already stained and leave it there until the paper is just about dry.

Depleted tea bag placed on a sheet to dry.

After it sits long enough, that one area with the tea bag has a nice, deeply stained area that stands out, no matter how much extra staining you do on the paper. And, if you continue to pile up papers as you get them done, then you get the double staining effect on both the bottom and top pages.

A tea bag placed on the paper while drying adds extra staining in that spot and the spot on the underside of the paper stacked on top of it.

When I first started tea staining my paper, I would do maybe five or ten sheets at a time and, as soon as I’d stained the first side of all the pages and stacked them together, I would flip the stack over and start on the second side. It does work to do it that way, but you definitely can’t get the tea bag spot stains on the paper when you follow that method because the tea bags don’t have enough time to sit and seep into the paper. If you want that added distressing, then you have to let the stack of paper sit for several hours, possibly overnight, for the stain to actually soak into the paper. Otherwise, skip placing the used tea bags because they’ll just be in the way and won’t produce any visible result. It took me about 12 tea bags to stain 25 full-sized pages (19.5″ x 24″) on one side only.

One more fun addition to your distressing is Walnut Ink Crystals. These can be used in both the crystal form and in the liquid form (which you can make from the crystals by following the directions on the package/jar). I use it most in the crystal form but it produces a very intense color so be careful that you don’t overdo it.

Walnut Ink Crystals

To get the spotted look, you need to sprinkle the crystals onto the paper while it’s wet. The wetter the spot, the more the ink crystal will spread. In areas where there’s standing water it will spread pretty heavily, discoloring most of the area. Where it’s more damp than wet, it will only spread a little, leaving a spot of ink stain.

Sprinkle the walnut ink in the wetter areas.

Walnut Ink as it bleeds on the paper.

I usually concentrate the crystals in the wetter areas and then sprinkle some of it across the paper. I’m pretty random about how I sprinkle it so it looks more like it just happened rather than being planned.

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Your best bet is to add the walnut crystals as you’re staining the paper. That way you don’t have to go back later and re-wet the paper. Plus, as you stack the finished pieces on top of one another, the walnut ink will also bleed onto the back of the page on top of it.

Walnut ink that bled onto the paper laid on top of it.

Once the first side is done, let the stack dry as long as you can stand to (I let the paper dry overnight). The stack doesn’t need to be sandwiched or weighted, especially since you don’t have any couching cloths between the pages and, particularly in a place as humid as Texas, you could wind up with mildewed paper if you’re not careful. Once it’s dried for awhile, flip the stack and start the tea-staining process again on the opposite side. Sometimes, I do both sides twice. This round, I actually only did the first side twice because the tea bags I used for that side were the frozen ones and they didn’t leave as much stain on the paper as the fresh stuff.

One last distressing method is the cup ring. This is where the liquid walnut ink comes in handy. I mixed up some pretty dark ink and have a jar of the stuff in my studio (I actually have a dark one and an extra dark one, plus a very light mixture in a small spray bottle). The jar I keep it in is a small 4-oz preserves jar (my hubby makes salsa so we have a bunch of preserve jars in various sizes) that has the perfect size bottom for making a cup ring on paper. I usually slosh the ink just enough for it to dribble over the sides and make a small mess on the counter (the joys of having a ceramic counter).

Sloshed ink all over the counter.

That way the bottom is covered in ink and ready for “stamping.” I just take the ink jar and press it onto the paper in various locations. I try to do this somewhat sparingly because I think it can be overdone, but it’s a fun addition and sometimes, depending on how you end up tearing your paper, you might lose one or two of the stains.

Cup ring on the edge.

Cup ring in the middle of the page.

The only thing you need to be aware of with the cup ring trick is that it doesn’t take to wet paper very well. In fact, just like the crystals, the wetter (or even damper) the paper is, the more it will bleed. Cup rings look much better when they’re sharper with just a bit of fade, bleed or missing spots so try to let the paper dry as much as you can stand before adding these in.

The paper was too damp so the ring bled out a lot.

You may have noticed throughout the pictures that the tea grounds are all over the paper. I don’t normally bother to clean them off until the papers dry and I’m ready to start tearing it. It doesn’t hurt anything and, once dry, I can take a large paint brush and dust most of them off. I like doing all of the staining and distressing while the paper is full-sized because it’s fun to see where things will end up once you’ve torn the paper and start folding and organizing it for binding.

Well, that was probably more than anyone could possibly want to know about how I tea stain paper, but hopefully I had some ideas and suggestions that were new for some people. If you end up having questions about anything I’ve done, please leave a comment or contact me directly.