Sometime back my son Richard brought me a large stem of Gorse, the bark is particularly interesting in that it is deeply fissured and angular making for a most interesting texture. Having already asked what He and his wife Jen would like me to make them, Candlesticks were settled on and I decided to use the gorse for the job.
In drying the wood split considerably, so a colour fill seemed a good option, having been employed several times before I was confident it would look OK. I also got some pearlescent powder which leaves a nacreous sheen, it works OK, but unfortunately part of the process is to heat the powder up upon the surface it is adorning to a pretty high temp with a heat gun, experiments proved that this darkened the wood (reaching a scorching point) and also caused further splitting, so I had to abandon that idea.
The bark, while looking great as a texture, was also pretty flaky and messy looking, I gave it a scrub with a brass brush which did improve it some, but it still had lots of tiny flakes hanging off, so I used this extremely fine gold powder and brushed it into the bark, then sealed it with an acrylic sealer, I finished the stems with shellac.
I also incorporated some of the gold dust into the dark blue to make it look like Lapis Lazuli.
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