Easy DIY Vintage Art on Your Printer with Tea Dye

I love those fancy-schmancy bits of framed art in TJ maxx and Homegoods but  I can’t always stomach the price tag that goes long with them. I wanted to share with you how you can easily make easy DIY vintage art on your printer with tea dye so you can make your own.  I already had a garage sale frame and an old dictionary so it was just the cost of printer ink and paper for an easy DIY art project to make beautiful vintage-inspired botanical art.

Start by picking a vintage image from a place like the Graphics Fairy. I found this amazing butterfly image. Print your favorite image on cardstock ( I have an ink jet printer but a laser printer also works. You can also use the printer at the library or send it over to your local print shop.).  After printing your image, lightly tape the edges of your image down underneath with double stick tape so that it doesn’t curl when it dries.

Then, brew a cup of black tea and let it cool completely with the tea bag in the cup. Once it’s completely cool  remove the tea bag. Squeeze it out to remove most of the liquid. Lightly dab across the surface of the print. If you used Ink jet ink, try to avoid the printed area, it smears and bleeds easily, so don’t rub across the image too much.

If you let drops fall onto the image, it spreads the ink and looks really old and water damaged which also gives it a cool vintage look. Let it dry completely still taped down so it dries flat. Tea dye is a great way to age something. I used tea to create these vintage looking tags.

To frame the image, I used double stick tape to tape old dictionary pages that had the words flutter and cocoon on them. I thought it was very fitting for my tea stained easy DIY vintage art from the printer.

Then I mounted the image onto the pages the same way to go with botanical art I already owned. If you want larger art, check out here to create large scale botanical art.

I love how they look together and tea dyeing art to make it look old is such an easy technique to try!

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