I want to make an image that looks like an old weathered stenciled sign.

I started by using San Diego font in black for a stencil look and put it in a rectangle with a border and filled it with a color with gradient from the middle out to give some variation to the fill color .

I would like to distress the font and fill color and the border so it looks a little blotchy or uneven to give it an old weathered look. How might I do that?

Use a recent development version of Inkscape (such as 0.47pre4 from the Inkscape homepage) and apply a filter or two.

Hi,

I'm using v.46 and didn't see any filters but the Help Menu says something about filters in .47. I'll upgrade and check it out. Thanks.

Maybe this can help you, look at the top left of the screenshot http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gal ... ngpath.png

Add more nodes (important!), then use Jitter.

Another way is to use Tweak objects tool , it has the option Roughen parts of paths.