I hope I can adequately describe what I am trying to do...
I am building some primitive country dining room furniture for my wife. She has some pretty definite plans for the way she wants things to look. For example: she wants the apron and the legs of the table to be painted black, but she wants the table top to be stained.
No problem so far.
However, she also wants the entire piece to be distressed and artificially aged. We've seen some pretty neat looking examples in various stores around, but I have no real idea as to how one would make it happen. We have played around with distressing/aging the painted parts, and we are pretty satisfied with those results. But it is the stained areas that I wonder about mostly.
How would one go about distressing, staining and adding artificial "patina" to a piece???