Jennifer Bertrand: Having furniture look high-end can cost a lot less than you'd expect. In a weekend with an easy to do gel stain, you can turn an ordinary wooden piece into something that makes the statement. With any refinishing project, it's important to start with the clean surface, this piece is unfinished and ready to go. When brushing on your gel stain, be sure to work in sections, so your get can't dry.
Gel stain is thicker than a wiping stain, so it's less messy and it works on all wood types. Take a rag and wipe off the excess gel stain and what you leave behind is your desired look. Really you just want to enhance the wood tone. When you're done, let your piece dry overnight. Now that our piece is dry, we can begin to add the character. I like to start by putting the gel stain in the crevasses. This is going to help make all of the architectural features pop.
I'm using the exact same gel stain I used yesterday which was the walnut, but you can use whatever tone you like, this is the fun part, where you get to add a little bit more of a drama. To wipe off the excess out of the crevasses, you're going to take a rag and you're just going to run your finger along all of the edges. If you accidentally pull off too much, don't worry about it, you can always go back in, add a little bit more with your brush and do it again.
Now, that we've finished putting in the crevasses, you can see it's made all of the corners really dark and you can do this to your liking. Take it really dark, you can take it really soft. Now, we get to do the fun part to the corners. You're going to take a brush, put a little bit of gel stain on it, brush it on in the corners, then you grab a rag and you're basically just going to blot and wipe it out. I like to call it smoking alp, because what we're going to do with the gradual fade, leading it darker in the corners and fading it out.
So, next thing you can do is to tip out all of the edges of the door, that means you're going to have just a little bit of gel stain on the brush and you're just going to slightly touch all of the edges. There are no rules, you do it to your liking. So, whatever you like, that's where you can stop. Now, we're going to let it dry and then it will be ready for a coat of polyurethane. Dry time is the most time consuming step in this technique, but as you can see from how this lovely piece turned out, the results from gel staining are well worth the way.
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