Scorched pine mouldings.

[Not your average framer]

I have a little kitchen blow lamp, it has it's own built in push button lighter and you refiller from a butane lighter refill aerosol. It is great for scorching and darkening the grain n cheap pine mouldings. A little bit of scorching, a quick bit of wax over the top and you've probably double the value in almost no time and what's more most of your competition won't know how you did it. I've been doing this a little while and there's nothing particularly clever about it at all apart from it needs a little practice tp get it right, but even then that's all there is to it. I've got quite a lot of basic not particularly expensive pine mouldings. I use them quite a lot for producing stacked moulding frames, ready made frames and the like, some have quite attractive woodgrain, but others less so. You don't get any choice about this, you order a batch and what you get is what you get, but you have to find uses for all of it.

Some of it is used for making extension rear box sections for deep box frames and there is a moderately good market for these. It's sometimes a little bit of work, but generally it makes some not bad money. It's cheap enough moulding to buy, but you need to figure out how to make it in to saleable items. Certain of these mouldings re produced for pine which has almost no knots and I normally avoid the bit with knots, but I reuse the bits whith knots to produce small "rustic" pine frames. Knotty pine went out with the ark,but "rustic" pine frames are something different if your shop is in a rural part of the country and I can sell these. I do really get enough piece of left over pine with knots to make enough of these frames. However you can use lots of left over bits if you scorch the wood a little with a small kitchen blow lamp and make them in to something which is percieved as being different.

Variety often seems to be the secret. Lots of customers seem to be almost pre-programmed to buy something if they can find something to take their fancy. I have silly amounts of pine left overs and off cuts. If I'm getting bored, it's time to look in the scaps box and make something, but if it can be something which customers don't see anywhere else, that definitely is helpful. Anything which is a little bit unique has a pretty good chance of selling and everyone likes something a bit different. Too many of our summer holiday makers are determined not to spend anything these days, sometimes I get lucky. We also have quite a lot of people who moved down here when the covid thing tarted. Lots of them wonder why it's so hard to find jobs down here, but these people are much easier to sell items to. They have moved in to new homes and they are still looking to buy things to put in their homes. So I suppose it's an ill wind that does no body any good!

[Not your average framer]

Another neat trick is to wire brush cheap flat pine moulding with one of those bronze brushes with you can get from Lion, they don't create a particularly deep effect, but they do produce at least some grain effect. You than scorch the wood and paint it with a thin layer of paint and distress the paint using solvent to remove enough of the paint to reveal the high points on the scorched wood and wax polist the finished result.

It looks great if you are using watered down Craig and Rose pale green chalky emulsion paint. As the paint has been watered down before it was applied, the amount needing to be removed by the solvent mix is very little and very quick to do. There's not really much to it.

[prospero]

Mark.... Have you tried flicking water onto pine, so it 'beads up' and then scorching it? It comes out like an old fishing rod.
It might look interesting on the right picture.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Peter,

No I've never tried that. Is it something that you think that customer would like?