coffee stains

This is what half of my kitchen looked like a few days ago – my coffee-staining paper experiment (my husband noted that he gets in trouble for staining things with coffee). I’m working on a new look for my business, and I was going for the tea-stained paper effect for my earring hangtags (as inspired by things I’ve seen on pinterest and etsy).

Armed with Adrenaline Explosion coffee (for the fullest effect), I started to experiment. I do think I could be successful after further trials. However, I did not have craft paper, but classic crest, which really doesn’t absorb coffee with much effect. I did end up with slightly darker, warped paper and coffee on my griddle (which was serving a as a paper drying rack).

Hmmm... I have my doubts about this going through the printer.

Being the graphic designer that I am, I set about to create the look electronically (some day I will catch up to the collage paper artists I so admire – really sincerely, I am just not that talented when it comes to that kind of thing).

To the computer…
They now have stock photography for everything (really truly), I searched for tea-stained paper and landed on bigstockphoto.com. Refining my search for vintage paper, I settled on an image and paid my $4.99. I am pretty happy with what I came up with – I think it does make my jewelry look more expensive (yes?).



Oh – the nice edge – that is crayola pip-squeaks “small potatoes” brown. Courtesy of yours truly – there is at least one thing I can do by hand!

But as to the nitty-gritty, any of you with photoshop, here’s what I did.

1. make the background a layer by double clicking on it in the layers palette and naming it.
2. back off the opacity to 50% (my image was too dark). Having cropped it to the desired size,
3. create a layer effect of a light inner shadow, by using Inner Glow. Adding noise to your shadow keeps the grainy effect.

Settings for inner glow in photoshop.

If a paper effect is what you are looking for, but you don’t enjoy the nitty gritty, then here is a business card sized background (it is just a little bigger so that it bleeds off the edge) - enjoy!

Click first to open full size and then right click to download. This is printer resolution.