Create An Antique Look

An antique look can increase the dramatic impact of your theme or add a feeling of wisdom and age to your scrapbooking page. Creating an antique look to your background or journals can be accomplished in several ways:

• Wrinkle the cardstock or paper
• Scratch the paper with an emery board or sandpaper
• Printed out your photos with an antique color wash (many photo programs now have a one-click sepia setting or similar)
• Use cream-colored and off-white backgrounds and papers. Avoid brighter colors and pastels
• Use a brown ink for text
• Find genuine old newspaper clippings - or find images on the internet and print them off onto thin paper, which you can then crumple and distress
• Aged letters, written in pen and ink, can also be very effective. Again, you might be able to find images on the internet which you can print and distress.
• Drag and dab a used, nearly dry tea-bag over the edges of your paper. Allow to dry before you use it (you can speed this up by putting the paper in a very cool oven - watch it carefully!)
• Look on Ebay, in car boot sales and garage sales for "vintage" memorabilia, wallpaper samples and other paper items which you can use in your designs.

Old letters have been used as a mount for photographs in this layout. The background is a lovely old design which has been scratched to age it further.

You might also think about making a faux wax seal for the page!

Create a leather look

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