I wanted to make Halloween party invitations that looked ghostly, so I went for the ancient and distressed look. I got the idea from the Better Homes and Gardens how-to guide.

We have stacks of manila paper sitting around at home, so I started with that. From the craft store, I bought walnut ink for staining, a spooky stamp, distress stamp pad ink and black ribbon.

I also downloaded the free Halloween font “Nemo Nightmares” from this free font site. There are so many to choose from. Pick the one that works best with your theme. Type out your invitation on a word processing program. (I used Microsoft Word, then saved it as a PDF.)

First I prepared for spraying with walnut ink by laying newspaper and scratch paper on my work table. Walnut ink is extremely staining. You wouldn’t want to mess up your table. Test it out on scrap paper first, so you know how far away you ought to be from your paper when spraying. I sprayed one side of my manila paper, let it dry, then sprayed the other side. A little goes a long way.

Once the stained manila paper is dry on both sides, I ran it through the printer, using the PDF file of my invitation. My PDF file contained 4 invitations on 1 page, so I also used a paper cutter to neatly slice my paper into quarters.

I used my cat stamp and distress stamp pad ink to put a little design accent on the invitation.

Once everything was dry, I snipped short lengths of ribbon, rolled up my parchment and tied ribbon around it. Now they look ready for the owl mail.