Last weekend, Sweet Husband was going through his sketchbook, throwing away half doodled on pieces of paper. He uses the nice stuff, and I hated to see it go to waste, so I rescued it and made something pretty.
I started out with about sixteen pieces of paper. Some of it had been drawn or written on, some had a little water damage on the corners, and some was completely blank.
I also pulled out these bottles of food coloring that I had leftover from egg-dying a few years back.
Then, I filled an old bake sheet with water and plopped in a few drops of the food coloring. I found it worked better if I added just one or two colors rather than all of them at once.
Then, in went the paper. After a gentle sloosh, I pulled it out and tucked it into a catalog (raid your junk mail) to soak up as much excess water as possible. Eventually--maybe every three dips or so--the water started to turn all one color. When that happened, I just dumped it in the sink and started over again.
Once I was done will all the paper, I stacked it all up and added more dye in strategic places with a bit of rag. If you stack the papers on top of each other as you do this, some of the dye bleeds through, which I found was a nice effect.
After carefully peeling the paper apart (it's delicate when it's wet) and letting the sheets dry, I folded them in half and bound them into a little book. There are millions of "how to's" for this on the internet (here and here are two easy ones), but I'm lazy so I just used my little eyelet setting tool to make four mini-books, then strung them together with a bit of lace trim--very 1980's, don't you think?
Tada! All kinds of ready for my to-do lists brilliant thoughts!
