Very Distressing…

Have I mentioned I’m a Cub Scout Den Leader in my neighborhood for Wolves and Bears?  We’ve got pack meeting coming up next week and I was put in charge of some decorations.  Our Blue and Gold Banquet is going to have a pirate theme.  I was asked to make some paper place mats for 50 people, some “burned-edge” music sheets for table decorations, and a treasure chest.  I haven’t tackled the treasure chest yet, but here is what I did for the place mats and the sheet music.

The original idea for the place mats was to use brown paper grocery bags and crumple them to look worn.  I didn’t have any paper bags, but I did have a roll of brown craft paper for wrapping.  I was able to get 46 sheets of 15″x12″ pieces for placemats.  I crumpled them each a few times and felt it was still lacking a little, so I turned them all into treasure maps with a path and “X marks the spot.”

(For the four others when my roll ran out, I just used brown lunch sacks. They’re a little thinner, but look about the same.)

For the sheet music, I knew I could find some digital scrapbook paper somewhere, but hate to use my color ink in my printer if I don’t have to.  And no point going out to buy a distressing kit because I’ve got a LOT of scrapbooking stuff I’ve collected over the years.  So I found some free sheet music online and copied and pasted it to fill a page.  Before I printed it, I spritzed all the pieces of paper with some liquid distressing ink mixed with water in a spray bottle.  Once the pages were dry I ran them through my printer using only black ink.  I’ve had the distressing ink for ages and have only used it once or twice, so now it’s served its purpose and I’m glad I didn’t throw it out.

Then I needed to burn the edges of the sheet music, all 40-50 pages I had printed.  I sat and burned the edges of one with a candle when the kids were all gone or napping so they wouldn’t see me playing with fire, and quickly realized it would make a mess and take forever to burn all those edges!  So back to the scrapbooking tools.  As I examined my actual burned page I knew I could use a brown ink pad on the edges, and saw that my old deckle-edge decorative scissors would probably look O.K. to snip the edges.

Here is the actual burned page:

And here is most of my stack of “fake” burned edges:

I didn’t cut all along the sides, just snipped here and there with two different-sized deckle-edge scissors. Certainly good enough for Cub Scouts!

This is why I collect supplies and have a hard time throwing them out. There could always be a perfect use for them some time in the future!

Thanks for looking!