Sheet Music Decoupaged Notebook

So, I'm going to be honest with you, I have never done real decoupage before.

There. My crimes to the DIY universe have been admitted.

But, today I decided to give it a shot and create a totally awesome vintage sheet music notebook.

Now, as a musician, I put off the idea of using sheet music for anything but playing for a long time. I just felt that it was wrong. But inspiration got the better of me, and I bought a 50 cent opera score from the thrift store. (I'm not a fan of opera anyway.)

In order to make this music look old, I had to use coffee, an oven, and an iron.
I used this blog post as a guideline:
http://www.ellaclaireinspired.com/2012/11/how-to-make-new-sheet-music-look-old.html

I ended up tearing sheets out individually instead of "aging" the book as a whole. I soaked them in a bowl of cowboy style coffee, spreading the grounds around on the page as I went. This took anywhere from 5-15 minutes. If you do it, you'll want to soak them until the page gets close to the color you want in your "old" sheet music.
Then I laid them flat on a cookie sheet and baked them at 200 for 5-10 minutes. After they were dried from the oven I put the cookie sheet on my ironing board and ironed the individual pages at a low temperature. This really dried them out and made them lay flat.

Voila! Vintage sheet music!

I didn't have modge podge on hand, so I made it myself by mixing one part water to two parts white glue.
Easy as pie.

After making my sheet music, I was stumped as to how to arrange it. Someone suggested I do some burns on the edges of the paper.
I liked that idea, so I had them burn the pages the way I wanted.
I was too scared to do it myself, but what you basically do is set the edge on fire and either blow it out or wipe it out (from inside the page to the edge) with your hand. Make sure you clean your hand each time to avoid ugly carbon streaks.

Then I did the whole decoupage thing:

For every piece of music I wanted to add, I put a layer of glue (using a paintbrush) on the surface of my notebook (or sheet music) where the page would be.
When I remembered, I put glue on the back of the music also.

But I forgot, quite a bit, actually.

When the music was all pasted on, I covered the whole page with my glue.
After that coat dried, I put another coat on, being sure not to spread it so thick that it blurred the music. I repeated this until I was comfortable with the idea of taking my book out of the shelter of my home.

AAANNNDDD I'm done!

Thanks for bearing with me on this post. I stink at blogging... but I think it will help me do more creative things more often. So thanks for reading.