With its black and white simplicity, sheet music is at once intricate and smooth, busy and elegant – making it a perfect choice for paper crafts of all kinds. While traditional craft papers are the usual choice for projects, many artists seek an alternative for unique designs
Altering sheet music for use in craft projects is simple. The paper adapts easily to a variety of antiquing and dyeing processes to give it additional color or texture. Since photocopying sheet music is prohibited by copyright laws, crafters should make use of their personal collections, recycling damaged pages or secondhand pages with little or no collectible value.
Antiquing Sheet Music
Ageing or antiquing sheet music for craft projects is simple, since the risk of runny or splotched ink is minimal. For a light patina, consider using a hot tea dye: spread the pages across a clean baking sheet (with closed sides) and pour a cup of strong, hot tea over them (black or pekoe). Let soak for several minutes, then drain and dry flat on a towel or rack.
For a quicker method, use a teaspoon of light brown paint mixed with a cup of water. Brush lightly over the pages and let pool in some areas to create additional "age spots" before letting dry. The finished product may be stiffer and somewhat wrinkled compared to the original, giving it a water-stained look and feel.
Additional Color
Colorizing sheet music is also an easy process, since the paper readily accepts light coats of paint without obscuring the lines or notes. Watercolors are a perfect choice for adding light, pastel colors to the paper. Heavier coats of paint will stiffen the pages and create darker colors, but will also cover up the paper's design, making it a poor selection for artists.
Liquid paper dyes, like those used for marbleizing paper, can add color if used lightly with minimal dyeing time for the sheets. The resulting dyed paper, with its light colors and quirky designs, is perfect for creating scrapbook items, wrapping paper, or mixed media projects.
Cutting and Shaping Suggestions
Whole pages can be used as backgrounds in scrapbooks or be altered for large-sized projects like picture mats or book covers. Cutting the pages for projects, however, can yield a variety of greeting cards and gift tags, as well as scrapbooking items and collage material.
For gift tags and cards, decorative pinking shears add graceful edges to the finished product. Rounded tips, zigzags, and ornate curves are a departure from the traditional jagged points of standard pinking shears, with angles designed to compliment the intricacies and flowing lines that form sheet music.
For traditional art -- including paper dolls, scrapbook decals, and paper chains -- a pair of sharp craft scissors is best for tracing delicate details or minute curves. Straight-line cuts can be made easily with a paper cutter and board.
Templates and Patterns
Tracing designs onto your paper is easy, using stencils, online templates, or household items like cookie cutters, for instance. An array of patterns and templates are available online, in the form of "trace and use" patterns for paper projects and printable stencils.
Other imaginative patterns include paper chain and paper garland templates, which allow artists to create a chain or individual designs based on a silhouette pattern. Many artists and crafters prefer to freehand their designs, especially for mixed media and collages.
Crafting Ideas
Sheet music adds a unique element to traditional paper crafts or holiday crafts constructed with the same templates as other projects. Small scrapbook and collage items can be cut from sheet music, such as flowers traced onto dyed paper or a folk art angel's wings cut from antiqued pages.
Paper doll dresses and accessories are a great project for sheet music paper. Trimming paper dolls, their dresses, and paper ornaments with tiny beads or sequins provides texture and design.
Sheet music contributes to projects both large and small. Cover an old journal in a large sheet of sheet music. Use small, folded pieces and a glitter pen to create place cards for a dinner party.
Be Creative
Exercise your creativity when using sheet music in place of traditional papers. The adaptable nature of sheet music means the designs are limited only to the imagination of each artist or crafter practicing this unique paper art.
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