Part one of the making of my Practical Magic style book.

I wanted the pages of the book to look aged at the beginning with the pages appearing newer as you get towards the end. Like a grimoire that has been passed down generations and each generation having added to the book.

Tea staining is a great way to age paper. With some trial and error on my part I finally found a technique I like.

My first try I just took wet tea bags and rubbed them on both sides of paper. It worked but not like I wanted. I even tried hibiscus tea to give the paper a pink tent. The dark red tea dried to a blue on the paper.

My second technique was to just soak each sheet of paper in a bath of tea. Some sheets I soaked a few minutes some up to thirty. I laid them around the house to dry. It was a slow process but well worth the wait.

I did try to dry some sheets in the oven but this summer heat was just too much for that craziness.

You can also stain paper with print on it. The tes won’t affect the print. I did get some pink tinted sheets by adding red food color to the tea.

The paper I used was 70 pound cover in natural white. I work at a print company so I do have access to huge sheets of paper which I can get cut to any size. 15×10.5 is the size of the paper which when folded gave me 7.5×10.5 sheets.

After the paper dried I put them in signatures of three. Next post will cover the sewing of the signatures.