Thank you everyone. I don't post many of my projects but I was very happy with how this one came out and felt the desire to "brag" because it was a challenge for me.
Charlie, I spent what seems like a fortune on those dyes but you only use a few drops so I think they will last a good long while. I just need to find lots of patterns that want the same colors! I was at Woodcraft with my 10% off birthday card and the guy said maple can be hard to stain and suggested the dyes. He also said the colors would be much more vibrant than you would get in a stain but, like stains, they let the grain of the wood show through.
Sheila, it was really the leaves that almost did me in. I literally spent hours on those leaves. Part of my trouble is that I really didn't know what I was doing. All the patterns say shape the wood and assume the reader knows what to do. Maybe most people do. I looked at the pics in the magazine and gave it my best but I was winging it mostly. Shaping techniques might be a good idea for an article sometime unless I am the only person that doesn't find it obvious.
The only part of the instructions that I found confusing (other than the shaping business which is true of all instructions I have seen) was that I wasn't sure about the veins in the leaves. I scratched my head for a while before deciding I was supposed to saw along those lines too. In hindsight, that was probably a stupid thing to wonder about. If it's a line on the pattern, you cut it, right?
