DIY Tea Dyed Paper - Several Methods

hello everyone it's natasha from cheshire books look how satisfying this looks in this video we're going to talk about all sorts of different things i'm answering all of your questions i'm going to show you how i create all of these different effects on the paper this is the one i get asked about quite often so i'll show you how i make this paper how do i get my paper to lie so flat how do i make my paper non-acidic or bring the acidity down as much as possible because as you know coffee and tea is very highly acidic how to create all different hues on paper and then we'll even go into some more other stuff like how to achieve all different types of color i'm going to answer all of your questions hopefully in this video confirm the things that you already know and maybe you might even learn something new who knows let's begin okay so this is the pen that i like to use and just for reference this is an a4 size sheet or eight and a half by eleven so you can see that i have some space in there i like to have a little bit of space because it's easier to take papers out i'm gonna pop in some tea bags i like to reuse my tea bags so i will use them once when they're brand new i will reuse them again for the second batch and then after that i throw them out or you know i i keep this the paper portion so how i know that i have already reused them is like this i'm going to cut off the strings and then the new ones that i put in i keep the strings on i mean these paper bits once the tea dyeing process is done that's how i know that i can reuse these ones again so all up i have 15 of the ones that i'm reusing so they're not as strong and then i'm just adding five new ones if i was just starting with some new uh black tea bags i would probably put in about 12 in there and you know i don't really count i usually just throw them in and i just go by you know how it's looking okay so the next thing that i do is i add boiling water so i think approximately i would put in there about two liters of water i'm not measuring anything i just kind of put it in but it's about two liters and now after the water's in there i will wait for about maybe 10-15 minutes just so that it cools down a little bit and i start putting my paper straight away you can sort of see how dark this solution is let's see maybe if this will show up better so that's not very dark but at this point i can add more tea bags or i can come in with a little bit of coffee as well sometimes i do that too there are no rules like you can do whatever you like it really depends on the effect on your paper that you're going for if you want really dark really grungy paper then you know i've had 24 tea bags in a in one session and and you know i would add a lot of coffee to get that really dark color so it all depends and every batch that i do comes out different because i just do whatever i feel like on the day i think today i'm just going to stick with the tea bags i'm not going to add any coffee and before i walk away from this and leave it for about 10 minutes because coffee and tea is very acidic i like to add a little bit of bicarb soda so this is very highly alkaline so it will neutralize the acidity of the tea and coffee and that's what we want so again i'm not really maybe i should measure this sort of stuff to know exactly but i kind of just guesstimate and i put about half a teaspoon in maybe just just add a tiny little bit because you don't want to make the solution overly alkaline either it has to be you know try and get a neutral you can go and buy those strips from the pharmacy i did do that in the past to test the solution to see if it's highly acidic or alkaline and that's i think how i sort of came up with this half a teaspoon approximately because i did test in the past and basically if your papers are overly acidic then the writing will start to disappear off the page 10 years 20 years down the track so you can see as the tea is tea bags are sitting in there the solution is getting darker so now i'm just going to leave it for a few minutes just until it's cooled down enough for me to be able to put my fingers in there my hand okay let me show you this so this is the these are the strips that i was talking about they indicate the ph of a solution so we want the solution to be at around 7 which is neutral hopefully not down here because then it's very acidic and how it's done is i mean we're not scientists it doesn't have to be perfect but you dip it in and then having a look at this here i can see that this is about an eight so the solution is slightly alkaline so what i did here just to kind of test you know what will happen is i added a little bit of coffee i mean i used a little bit of this solution then i had just a tiny little bit of coffee and let's have a look so i'm gonna test this so this should make it more acidic and then you can see it's kind of cl getting closer to the number seven which is neutral so what i could do at this point now that i know that my solution is alkaline i could go and add more tea bags or coffee to bring it to neutral and just to show you the difference here you can see how it's become lighter when i added coffee so i don't usually overthink it this much i just kind of put stuff in and you know i'm quite happy so i think i'm just going to leave the solution as it is because i don't want you to feel like you have to go and get these strips and then you have to go and test your solution as long as you've got you've got a little bit of bicarb soda in there maybe just use a little bit less than half a teaspoon for two liters of water just just put some in there and it will be okay most people are not worrying about this sort of stuff anyway all right so now that that's cooled down a little bit it's still steamy but i put a glove on and usually it's okay for me so what i do is i just move the tea bags out of the way put them in one spot or take them completely out but i like to keep them in there because there's still goodness in there they're still doing their job so then i start to layer my papers and i do this one by one so i like to start when the solution is still hot because i find that first batch of papers is always the darkest so i actually do this one by one just put it in and i put in there as much as can fit so the first few papers that i submerge or first i don't know 15 i submit i like to cover completely so then i get one color one completely the same color on a page when it's done now if i want to achieve something like this which i like to do from time to time you can see these effects on a page and it looks really good once it's bound into a book this is how i get that happening so it's really quite easy i just put the paper in but i don't submerge it fully i find that the more papers you place on top the papers underneath will sort of soak up and be covered completely so usually i will do this towards the end as i'm nearing you know the end of how many papers i can fit in there so you can just play around at this stage i have tried getting a whole stack of papers like like this for example to put it in the whole stack of papers but then i find that most of the page stays white and it just gets a little bit of color on the sides and it's just not enough for me but you do you the point is to experiment and every batch of papers is going to be different every tea dyeing process yields different results so now i might want to add some book pages in there it doesn't have to just be copy paper so obviously the pages that i want to be completely submerged i would do them first and then i will do i should have done those at the end the ones that i was doing before these ones so then maybe i will add in some coloring pages i also like to dye these writing shades because they have such a beautiful crunchy sound once they're tea dyed another thing that i sometimes do is i'll show you and now this is actually going to make this solution more neutral because what i do sometimes is during my tea dyeing process i will just maybe sprinkle a little bit of coffee like this on a page and then go straight over the top with another page so once i take it out to dry it leaves i do have to kind of wipe it off but it leaves these spots uh the whole point is to experiment and and see you know what works and what doesn't everything pretty much works now i'm going to put some doilies in there why not i've also used onion skins to tea dye paper oh tea dye to color paper see here this one's waiting for the next batch of onion dyeing so if you want to see that video let me know and start collecting onion skins and i use both red and yellow onion skins just got a couple of doilies in there and here's my last page and so now i might put these bags kind of on top especially if i have used more paper and it's kind of all floating up i like to put these bags back on top just to hold everything down under the solution okay now i like to leave this for a good few hours or overnight if i was doing this at night time i would just leave it overnight today i'm going to leave this in there for about three hours or so and then i'll come back and if anyone wants to know these ph strips you can find them in pharmacies they're very inexpensive or ebay amazon online that sort of stuff so they're very very cheap so if you if you wanted to make sure your solution is neutral then get these i'll be back in a few hours so when it's time to start taking my papers out to dry i actually place them onto this tablecloth this tablecloth has a plasticky top finish and then some type of a felt fabric underneath the plastic prevents tee sort of you know soaking through onto my floor so i have that ready and this is how it looks and then i also have one of these plastic i'm not sure what they're called but it's plastic and i will show you how i use this to create some patterns on my pages okay here we go it has been less than three hours it's only been two hours but i think the color is uh okay and i need to finish this before school pick up so that's why i've only left it in for two hours but usually i will leave it in definitely longer than that okay so first i'm going to remove all of these tea bags okay i'm going to leave this to dry because i'll be reusing these ones for my next tea dyeing process and the ones that i have cut off i will be keeping the bag portion of the tea bag and you might have seen what i do with those in some of my previous videos okay so now i gently remove a few pages at a time and i kind of hold it in there so it rains as much as possible sometimes i might leave them in batches like this to dry or what i like to do is lay them out in single layers so i will very gently separate them and just lay out single layers okay so this is how it's looking so far the ones over there at the top are all single sheets and then some of these ones down here i've stacked two or three together these lined pages over here these ones here i've taken out the whole stack and just laid them out there and i'm gonna start separating them once they start drying a little bit now next i'm going to show you how i do how i use this plastic doily table runner to create those effects on paper once it's dry so for the ones that i want that imprint on them i don't drain them as much i just take them out and put them down so they're very soaked still you can see how it's dripping there we go so i try to fit in as many as i can and then you can see they're quite soaked and then i just simply lay this over the top and i'm going to smooth it down and i'm just going to leave it to dry as it is i'm not going to be touching it at all until it's completely dry okay so obviously because of the space issue and space is an issue this process actually takes me two to three days to complete so i as you can see i still have pages left in there that i can't actually fit because my space has been taken up those single pages that i've placed up the top they're going to dry very quickly and then before they're completely dry i stack them up and then i keep adding more pages so it's a constant process over two to three days this is an issue if you don't have space in your home to to have something like this sitting there for two to three days and that's why a lot of people do oven drying i have tried it i'm not a huge fan i just i just don't do it this is how i do my papers and i find the process very relaxing and meditative and because i've taken lots of pages out of here and i have some space left i'm going to add more white paper in there to dye that paper while this paper is drying so i've added more paper in a couple of hours once some of my pages that i've laid out have dried i'm simply going to flip this over just grab the whole thing like this and flip it over and i'm going to start taking those pages out and laying them out to dry and i'll just keep repeating this process until i have used up all of my solution but i won't do it more than three days because it starts to go bad but i just want to show you this this is all pages done from my previous tea dyeing session you can see here that this tablecloth and some of them if i leave them very soaked it leaves this kind of an imprint or texture on them and also the reason why i'm showing you this is because i always get questions about do i iron my paper and how do i get it so flat so let me show you here for example as my papers are nearly dry or completely dry i just stack them up one over another you can see this it's completely flat i never really dropped everything i never iron my paper if you especially if you leave it under something heavy it will be even flatter but this is i don't mind a little bit of wrinkle in the paper all right here we are day two the next morning and this is how much i've got so far so you can see i've already quite a have quite a lot and i'm just stacking these up you can see it's already quite flat now with some of my papers that have dried you can see here these ones here these papers have dried and then i'm put them back down and add some splotches to them and i just use a soaked tea bag and just just add some splotches and then let it dry again as my pages are drying and i'm stacking them i'm creating more space and then i keep adding pages here and i also keep adding pages into my solution which is now nearly completely used up so this will probably be the last batch of papers that i'm putting in this solution i usually do this whole process about maybe once every two months so i hope i didn't confuse anyone with the tea bags here i don't actually keep using them in this solution that i've made i made the solution and i don't need these until my next batch of tea dyeing which will be in a few months time okay let's have a look at the final result so all of my pages are dried all of my solution has been used up and this is how much i got out of it there's quite a lot of pages there for quite a lot of journals and i only had one casualty okay so let me show you the effect so obviously i'm not going to go through all of the papers but these are the splotches the ones with the splotches that i showed you and they look i love this look actually and especially in a journal then these ones here are the ones with the plastic doily so some have a really faint imprint it really depends on how soaked the paper was so you can see these ones here this looks really cool and i like to put these pages as the first page in a signature and this one here and it even sort of comes out on the other side as well okay next up it's hard to see but these are the ones that i didn't submerge completely and they will have this beautiful kind of something on them and every page is different i really love that effect as well all right next up the book pages the coloring pages so this this type of paper tends to really soak in quite a lot of that color so they always turn out looking really nice and dark next i've got just uh some sheets that have been completely submerged and i just wanted to show you the difference between let's have a look at this page and this page here so you can see the difference in the color this one was left overnight and this one this is the first batch that i did and this one was only in the solution for two hours so you can see how it goes much darker when you leave it in there for longer but i also like to have the different hues throughout my journal so next are these line pages i love to tea dye these because they have a wonderful crinkle sound i know a lot of people dried their papers in the oven because it gives that it gives the paper this crinkly sound but this one is crinkly because it's very thin paper these ones here are the ones where i sprinkled coffee on top and you can see how it's given me these spots on the page and then i also in all of my tea dying processes i use scrap paper so paper that's written on on one side paper like this you know that's had some notes and usually people would recycle it so i keep all of that and then i t dyed and i use it for making journaling spots so let's say for example this is an image from a reader's digest book and i want to make this into a journaling spot so i would glue this on top of this cut that off and then i have a little card with you know writing space at the back and i'm not using my good sheets of paper that i've got here that i can fold in half and bind into a journal i really love all of these different effects that we can create with tea dyeing paper and i also pulled out some other pages that i wanted to show you and this is what i'm talking about hues i just love mixing different colors of paper in a journal so here is a paper dyed with avocado this here is easter egg dye and you can see really really cool effects so if you want to see maybe a video on that i can show you i wouldn't have to show you my you know how i sort of dry the papers and stuff you can see this one here was my attempt at drying the paper over a drying rack and that didn't go too well for me and that's also easter egg dye so all different colors this is green tea i'm pretty sure i can't be a hundred percent sure but i'm pretty sure it's green tea and it gives this gray gray color i don't know if it's coming up but if you compare it to white it gives it a great color and then if you compare it to tea dye you can see and then this really yellow one that's onion skins so i think the point is just to have a play i hope that you realize that the main point of this video is that there is no right or wrong way of how you do things i wanted to do this because i get questions about this how do you get your pages so flat do you iron them i have never ironed paper in my life i don't have time to iron things that should be ironed please let me know if you enjoyed this video i know that this is something that you guys know how to do but i think it's always interesting to see other people's processes and i've watched other people's videos and how they make theirs let me know which effect is your favorite mine is the splotches one this one here but of course i wouldn't when making a journal i will only have one of these pages in there love that look like i wouldn't overdo i mean how cool would it be to have a full journal a real grungy journal with just these pages the opportunities are limitless you know please let me know of any other methods that you have tried or other things that you have used to color paper and thank you so much for watching and i will see you in my next video bye

Channel: Treasure Books

Views: 66,665

Keywords: DIY Tea Dyed Paper - Several Methods, How to tea dye paper, methods of tea dying paper, diy tea dyed paper, how to tea stain paper, tea stained paper, aged paper, diy vintage paper, how to coffee dye paper, how to make paper look old tutorial, diy old paper with tea, diy old paper effect, aging paper, how to make paper less wrinkly, how to make paper acid free, how to age paper, how to make paper archival, make paper look old, natasha from treasure books, treasure books

Id: yxh_JoV5O2c

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021