Using a New Medium to Stain Wood

by Kelly Condie Thompson

10 Materials

$50

4 Days

Advanced

I have a son-in-law who can build anything. (Just wish they didn't live so far away.) Anyway, one year he and my daughter asked what I would like for a gift? I had an entire house full of ideas that I would love him to help me with. But for now, I just wanted him to build me a picture frame for a very large oil painting that I had been hanging onto. I think the picture cost me $35, but the frame would have been hundreds. So, we went to the lumber supply store and picked out some wood that went together, brought it home and he made me a beautiful wood frame for my picture.

YEARS went by without me using the frame because I didn't know how to stain it to let the beauty of the wood come through. I even tried staining it once and it looked like something out of a spaghetti western - all old and splotchy.

I decided to try to sand it down and remove that stain and wait until I could do it better.

Enter hometalk.

I decided to try the three or four brown paper stains that I had. And I eventually even added blue to the hickory smoke. This color picked up the blues in the painting.

With these spray on stains, I could spray them on the wood and rub them into the wood with latex gloved hands. But to prevent the spray from going all over my kitchen, I made a mat of old shopping bags and tape for the large frame to sit on while it was being sprayed and was drying. I would put down a row of bags overlapping them and then use a long row of tape to hold them all together. Then I'd tape all the rows together. The more preparation I made before hand, the easier the clean-up was.

But I think you can see by this picture that if I hadn't put the two lines of gold paint in the spaces, it would have been plain indeed. Can you tell where I decided to use the three different colors of stains. (Where the wood line broke up. I used the lightest color closest to the picture, then the dark wood color, and lastly the blue color. The blue had to be squirted onto a cotton ball and rubbed on. Unfortunately, it didn't cover the Elmer's Wood putty that I chose to use to cover the tiny nail holes that held the pretty wood onto the main part of the frame. So there is a variation in color on these parts.

The paint that I had on hand was running low, but I had a very fortunate thing happen. The gold ink in my pens was the EXACT same color as the paint that I was using. SCORE!!! So I just continued with the pens or fixed any mistakes that I could find with it. And, the pen was SO much easier.

We used an electric stapler and some LARGE craft sticks to run across each corner of the frame on the back to help hold the painting into the frame. They were very easy to staple into the wood frame and are holding quite well.

And here is the painting, up on the wall. I am so happy with how the frame turned out. I love how it picks up the colors in the painting. Before we put the picture in the frame, we did spray the frame with 2 layers of acrylic sealer. We took a tarp outside and set the frame on four old planter pots to elevate it and made sure to spray all over the frame including the inside and the underside of the frame - just to be sure everything was covered. It is a very large painting and takes up a very large amount of space, but I'm so excited to finally get it completed. Thanks Hometalk, for the the inspiration!

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2 of 3 comments

William on May 01, 2018

Very cool! Looks like a great product. Great share. Frame looks great. Love the craft stick idea to hold that painting in the frame.

2 Reply
Alicia W on May 03, 2018

Loved the idea of using craft sticks to hold the painting to the frame. Very inventive.

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