Table Top Re-visited

Finished Table Top

I wanted to apply the technique I previously posted to this table top. Two wood veneers have been used, ash and figured cherry. I wanted to dye stain the ash a light brown color and the cherry red. I spray the dye to get uniform coverage. The challenge is controlling the spray so that it doesn't stain the wrong wood. I accomplish this by masking the wood, just as you would when painting.

To highlight the grain of the ash, I first applied a gel stain. Details about this are in a previous post. The next step is masking the ash with tape and then spraying the surrounding cherry with a red dye. I use water-based dyes made using Homestead's TransTint. Straight lines are easy to tape but the curve looked to be difficult.

Luckily, I had cut another curved section to help glue the top together. I used this as a template for cutting the tape with a knife. This made taping the curved sections easy.

I covered the remainder center of the taped section and then sprayed the red dye on the cherry. I remove the tape immediately so that there would be less chance of the red dye soaking under the tape. As I discuss in my previous post, spraying a mist of dye makes it dry immediately. After the dye completely dried, I applied tape over the cherry and sprayed the ash with a brown dye.

I again removed the tape immediately, and after the ash dried, I sprayed a light coat of shellac to protect the dye from the water-based finish. The final step was to spray the Minwax Polycrylic and then I was done. The top photo shows the finished top.