Stained Pen

Hi all,
 I was very pleased with the needle pot that I recently made. The turning was nice enough, but the finish with the coloured stains really gave the project a lift. Here's a picture of the pot for those who didn't see it.

The stains I used were from the Chestnut sample range and I think it came out very nice. In fact, I became so excited about the colouring that I decided to see if it could be done on a pen.

I chose a Zeta pen kit from Taylors Mirfield because they supply top quality kits and I wanted to do the colouring justice. The wood I used for the blank was maple, which gave a nice light base colour for the stains to sit on. The turning went well and I sanded it through to 2000 grit and applied sanding sealer just like I did for the needle pot.

So far so good, but a sack load of crap was waiting around the corner. To apply the stains I rolled up some kitchen towel and taped it around the middle so that it looked something like a short pencil. I made several of these, one for each colour.

Anyway, I applied the stains as I had done before, working very quickly and to my horror the whole lot just turned into a brown muddy mess. I tried wiping some stain off and then applying some more but it just got worse. The whole thing was a bloody mess and if that wasn't bad enough, in my panic to sort it out, I knocked a bottle of orange stain all over my bench. More panic set in and I grabbed some kitchen towel to mop it up. Of course at this point I wasn't wearing any gloves and orange stain went all over my hands. It seeped behind my nails and went everywhere. I grabbed more kitchen towel and some methylated spirits to try and clean it off but all I manged to do was dilute it. Me and the work shop looked like we'd just been Tangoed

Anyway, after cleaning up the mess I'd made, I sanded the mucky stain off the pen and did it all over again, Only this time, I did it slowly and applied much less stain with each colour.
Here's the pen.

I think it looks great and I learned a lot from my mistakes. The first lesson was, when applying stains do it slowly and methodically and do not saturate the project.
The second lesson was, put the caps back on each bottle after applying each colour so that there will be no spillages. Lastly, always wear gloves when messing with stains.

My wife has asked me to turn a pear for her next so that she can do some pyrography on it. I will show you that in my next post.