0 Creating artwork from your wedding song - without burning down the house!

I've seen plenty of pins on Pinterest where people have used sheet music of their wedding song to create artwork.  When I was looking for something to fill the frames hanging over my desk, I thought this would be a neat thing to do.  I wanted to put a picture of our first dance with some sort of artwork next to it representing our first song.

At first I tried to create a digital image in Photoshop with the lyrics, but nothing I did turned out exactly like what I wanted.  So I went back to some of the pins I'd seen of sheet music.  Luckily, I was able to find sheet music of our wedding song free online by Googling.

I started reading some posts of how people antiqued their sheet music for artwork because I knew I didn't want a bright white sheet of paper.  I read descriptions of dipping paper in coffee and then baking in the oven.  I'll be honest, this was a little scary for me.  Paper, in the oven?  You want me to burn my house down?  So I decided to go about this my own way.

I printed out the sheet music on parchment paper from Wal-Mart that I always keep handy because it's so useful for lots of different projects.  It has an aged color to it already.

After printing it out, I crumpled up the paper a few times.  After unfolding, instead of having the patience to brew coffee or tea to age the paper more, I just grabbed a little bit of dirt from a potted plant nearby and rubbed it into the paper.  My husband, who was sitting next to the potted plant, stared at me a little bit like I was crazy while I was doing this but only said "Well, whatever you do always turns out looking good....."

It's the look I was going for, took 3 seconds to do, and my house was never at risk of burning down!