Weathered Wood Techniques {Oxidation and Stain}

Our.Bed.Is.Done!!!  I'll give you a full tutorial later this week but I am going to start with telling you about the process of choosing how to weather the raw wood we used to build the bed.

The experimentation process involved scraps of the bed wood, Rust-oleum sunbleached wood stain, steel wool and white/apple cider vinegar.

To make a batch of steel wool and vinegar oxidation stain we purchased large canning jars and simply put a chunk of steel wool in each jar then filled jar 1 with distilled white vinegar and jar 2 with apple cider vinegar.  Make sure to leave room because the process releases gas and I was afraid our jars would explode because my husband filled them too close to the top and they were building up a lot of pressure.  Let the jars sit for about a week before testing on your scraps of wood.  We tried earlier (3 days) and while it did discolor the wood a little it was not very noticeable.

I have heard about using black tea on the wood to speed up and enhance the oxidation process and have tried it on a wood cheese box BUT the wood turned soooo dark and got this weird dusty, rusty smelling film over it as it dried so I decided to skip it this time and see what happened!  My conclusion unless your wood does not change color at all is that it is a completely unnecessary step.

Top left: sunbleached stain over apple cider vinegar mix
Top right: apple cider vinegar mix after 3 days
Bottom left: apple cider vinegar mix after 1 week
Bottom right: distilled white vinegar mix after 3 days

In the picture below you can also see a raw board with the sunbleached stain (top) and a board that has the sunbleached stain over highly concentrated distilled white vinegar mix (2nd).

My favorite sample was the sunbleached stain over the highly concentrated vinegar stain but we had a hard time duplicating the results (as seen on the third board {left side} above).

So?  Which staining process did we go with?  Check back later this week for the final reveal!

 

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