Making Homemade Wood Stain

There are many ways to color wood, with the most common approaches being the use of commercially available wood stains and dyes. Over the years WWGOA has provided you with tons of tips for choosing the best wood stain, and has even demonstrated the making wood stain from plants. But now George has discovered a new approach for making homemade wood stain, and you’re not going to believe this one. This approach for making homemade wood stain will come in handy if you are trying to achieve a rich dark stain, ideal for a traditional arts and crafts project, but don’t want to deal with dangerous chemicals such as ammonia.

The technique uses low cost materials that are readily available at any home center, is easy to mix and use, and has good shelf life. Can you guess what is used for making this homemade wood stain? Roofing tar! No, this is not crazy; it’s really cool!

To use roofing tar as a homemade wood stain, you’ll want to keep a couple things in mind:

The Perfect Mix

You’ll mix it with mineral spirits to achieve the color and consistency that you’re after. Too much mineral spirits and it will be too light, too much tar and it will be too thick and dark. So you’ll want to experiment to find the perfect color and consistency for your homemade wood stain.

Mix enough for your entire project

You’ll want to be sure that you have enough homemade wood stain mixed so that you can coat your entire project. If you run out part way through the project, it will be difficult to mix up another batch of homemade wood stain that will match the previous coating exactly, and you could end up with a project that doesn’t look quite right.