dyeing paper

Hey there campers; it's been awhile!

I thought I'd test the waters with a brief post about dyeing paper for special projects like wedding invitations, book binding or Christmas cards.

I dyed this fuchsia paper for wedding invitation inserts this summer.

You can dye any paper; it's made of plant fiber most of the time, like cotton clothing. High cotton-content paper and paper with linen fiber get the best color, but even regular newsprint or drawing paper can be dyed using Rit Dye or Dylon. (Dylon is my preference.) This color is called Flamingo Pink.

I used a 110 lb arches cold press watercolor paper trimmed to A4 size, then pre-soaked it in a bath of hot water with just a dash of dish soap. I use the dish soap as a nod to my method of dyeing clothes; I always pre-soak and wash to achieve even dyeing by saturating the fabric and removing any waxes, oils, or fixatives. With paper, the saturation is key and the soap, while probably not completely necessary, is just a little bonus to help assure that the saturation is allowed to happen.

I dye paper in my stainless steel kitchen sink. It's easy, large, readily available and unlikely to stain. I boil water and pour it into the plugged sink; just until I have 2 or 3 inches of water in the sink. I add 3 or 4 times the recommended amount of salt and stir until dissolved.

I add the dye before I add the paper, and stir till dissolved. A quarter of a package is a good place to start, since I dye paper in batches. Paper into dye, saturating one side and then the other, eight or ten sheets in the bath at a time. Keep track of how many, as you'll be turning and repositioning the sheets in the bath every ten minutes or so for relatively even dyeing. And repeat until the dye cools or you get a color a couple of shades deeper than your desired result (dyed paper and fabric tend to lighten as the dry).

Of course, the idiosyncrasies of hand-dyeing are often desirable. I like to sprinkle a little dye powder in the bath to add speckles sometimes.

Rinse in cool water, then press gently in a towel,  hang with pipe cleaners ("chenille stems") and clips, and let air dry.

Paper will warp a little as it dries, so ironing will be necessary to run dyed paper through a printer or a printing press. Use a press cloth and turn your iron on the cotton setting, no steam.

Thanks for dropping in as I attempt to get my sea legs back! I hope you'll stop by again soon. I aim to.

paper airplane party invitations

Printed on vintage accounting ledger paper.

Airmail graphics for label and stamp are from The Graphics Fairy, and were printed separately on label paper and attached to the airplanes like stamps. ("6 cents" was changed to "4 cents" in Photoshop.)

Postmark is a combination of several glyphs from a font called Dead Letter Office available free from daFont, altered in Photoshop.

Text typeset in Helvetica (all caps, outlined) and Trixie.

I had brainstormed ideas for invitations for my kiddo's Flying Machines party and came up with the idea of a paper airplane invitation that looked like Air Mail. A quick search revealed that it's not a unique idea. Boo hiss. I used this design from Country Living Magazine as a template for my planes, although the result is pretty different.

If you like these but don't want to invest the time to create your own, please e-mail me. I can create a version with your child's name and party details for a reasonable rate, with a 3-day turn-around.

Thanks for reading!

golden book baby shower invitations

I recently offered to throw a baby shower for a good friend of mine, and because this will be her second child and she already has a house full of hand-me-downs, she requested that the gift giving be kept to a minimum. Partially because of that request (and partially because she's a book lover like me) I settled on a "vintage / classic kids' books" shower theme.

The invitations went through an extensive brainstorming and planning phase, after which I finally decided to use vintage Golden Books as the base.

This may not be a new idea entirely; since landing on the concept I've seen a few different versions of Golden Book baby shower invitations. A few use just the covers, discarding the pages.

Yikes. As a book lover throwing a party for a book lover, that idea makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Admittedly, I have that response to pretty much any project I see people blogging about when it involves chopping up vintage books, even having worked in bookstores and witnessed what happens to mass market paperbacks. Or maybe because of it.

Anyway, I trolled St. Vincent dePaul's section of kids' books to find some classic titles in older editions with a bit of age to them. Because the guest list was small, I didn't mind that each of the books was different, but this project might be a little extreme for a guest list of more than a dozen.

Of course, Baby Animals was pretty perfect for this project, but really, nearly any Golden Book can be altered to make the perfect invitation (as shown above).

Using my YA Library Book Slips fabric design as a base in Adobe Illustrator, I designed and printed out some library check-out slips on manila card stock using the family's last name (Geisel, in this case, is a pseudonym) in place of the author and "The New Baby" as the title.  These were the "registry" info cards, except in this case they included language inviting people to forego traditional registry gifts in favor of vintage kids' books or small handmade items.

The little envelopes to hold the cards inside the books are made of the same card stock trimmed, folded, and held in place with GlueDots. (If you can't find manila card stock, do what I did and cut some manilla file folders down to 8.5 x 11" sheets using a paper cutter.)

I scanned the front cover (inside and outside) to alter slightly in Photoshop.

For the fronts, I added on each book the words "& Baby Geisel" to the title, matching the the title font and wear pattern as closely as possible.

For printing on the reverse, I moved up the bookplate and made the endpaper pattern fully repeat, before layering on the text in a font similar to the Little Golden Books font. (Click to zoom for detail.)

Printed and trimmed . . .

. . . then scored along the spine and ready to attach . . .

. . . with three glue dots.

I used washi tape tabs to indicate where to open the books . . .

. . . and used more washi tape (white and yellow, so the golden spines still showed through a bit) to cover the spines. Then I tied them up with baker's twine and put them in some shipping envelopes to ready them for mailing (complete with logo for the Geisel Family Library Foundation).

Repeat for all titles.

This project is, admittedly, a bit labor intensive and requires some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Like the look but want to skip the work? I can put some together for you, too! Contact me for pricing and scheduling by leaving a comment below, or by e-mailing (whoamillie (at) thenightgarden.com).

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger simply by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.

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