Hi guys! Welcome back to Where The Gnomes Live. Today I'm going to show you how I aged
some coffee sticks. Now these coffee stir sticks I've been using for years in my gnome
house. And I build floors out of them actually. They cut easily with scissors. You can stain
them real easily with instant coffee, which I've been doing all these years. I'll quickly
show you my floors in the gnome home. Okay, so here's my gnome home and it's full of wooden
floors. I've done wooden floors throughout. And that's all coffee stir sticks. Every floor
in this house, is pretty much coffee stir sticks. What I do with them, is, after they
are glued in place, I use instant coffee to stain them that beautiful color. And I don't
have to use chemicals or breathe in chemicals. Instant coffee. After you stain it with instant
coffee you have to seal it with something to keep that color in place. So I use a water
based sealer, and I have tutorials here on youtube showing how I've done these floors.
But! I recently aged some wood here in my real house. It's this sewing table right here,
I have to back up, the lighting isn't that great. It's hard to see. I actually took videos
as I did this. This is fir, that my dad cut me, and then I aged it and I whitewashed it.
So I'm going to throw in a couple of those video clips so you can see what I'm talking
about. I'm about to age this wood here, to make it look like old barn (barn) wood. And
I'm just going to paint it on! Apparently it's that easy... alright I'm about half way
done, you can see the reaction is already starting to happen. And it looks really cool!
Here we are an hour after the vinegar was put on. Look at that awesome color. This is
just a shadow here, I , ah, put my fans on it to speed up the drying process. Okay, you
can see the drastic change I seen in the wood and of course my mind immediately went to
miniatures, of course. And I thought about my coffee stir sticks. Now that aging effect
will do different things on different pieces of wood. I'm going to show you real quick
what I'm talking about. Now this is fir right here. This is what my table top is made out
of. This is the before and this is just with one brush of that vinegar, just one brush
of that vinegar. And you can see a huge difference. My whole table top looked like that. And then
this is cedar wood here. And that's, again, that just one brush with that vinegar. Let
it dry and that's the big change you see. So with the stir sticks, (this ,I I ) doesn't
say on the package what they're made of but I looked it up online and apparently it's
birch wood. So you don't get such a big effect with the vinegar but you can change the wood
quite drastically. So I'm going to show you, ah, in the next couple of clips, what I did
to get theses, ah, different tones here. You can't get anymore simple than this. You just
take your vinegar and depending on how much you want, to do this whole big table that
I just showed you I used just a half of a jug, of thi, of a one liter. So for a little
job, I'm just going to guesstimate, oh I think that's enough right there. and then you take
your super fine wool. I'm just going to take one pad of super fine wool and I'm just going
to break it up..just push it all down. Make sure it's all covered with the vinegar. And
then you just let that set for 24 hrs. If you want to contain the smell of the vinegar,
put a lid on it and just set it aside for 24 hours. Alright my friends, 24 hrs has gone
by now you want to strain the vinegar out an and a cheesecloth would work great but
I don't have one of those so I'm just going to put a tea towel over and strain it through
that. Okay. And then you can discard the used up steel wool. Just throw that away. So depending
on how you want to do this, you can build your floor onto your template or put your
floor into your dollhouse or whatever, and then you can take this, that's been strained,
and just brush it on. Just brush it on your work that's already been built. If you want
to do a whole batch at one time, like I've done here, I've pre-did a whole package of
sticks. And what I did was just open up the package and I just dump them in there. I just
mix them up until I could see that all of them are covered with the vinegar. Then you
can just let that sit, um, for about 30 seconds to a minute. Just to make sure that every
single stick in there gets a vinegar solution on it. Okay, so once your done that then you
can just take the sticks out. And you might want to wear gloves, um, I didn't wear gloves
anytime I've done this and I just wash my hands after but those with a little bit more
sensitivities maybe some rubber gloves would be good. Okay, so I just take a towel and
I lay out my sticks and let them dry. Just spread them out, make sure the air can get
to all of them. You can just set a fan on these too. I've done that, put a couple fans
on them and they dry a lot faster. Okay, so it's kind of hard to show you the color difference
in the film, it's not totally picking it up, it's not the best color, like I'm not totally
in love with it but you can see it does change the color quite a bit. So I just dipped the
one end in and that's totally dry. So here's my sticks that were dipped into that big um
pan there for a minute or so. These are the ones that were dipped and these are the ones
that weren't. So you can see, it has changed the color quite a bit. But to age these even
more then they have been here, what I did was, I took the vinegar solution. This is
the solution here that was um soaked for 24 hours inside the steel wool and then I strained
it into here. What I did was I poured it back into the bowl, and then I took another piece
of steel wool, and I broke it up, and I just did the same thing. I let that sit overnight.
Alright, these aren't attached yet but I just made a template out of a piece of cardboard
and I'm going to glue down half untreated and half treated. So this is how I make my
floors in my dollhouse. I just make a template first. And that's a whole heck of a lot of
glue, so I'm going to take some of that off of there. You don't want too much glue because
it will, ah, seep up between the sticks and then you'll have to wash the sticks off before
you put anything on them. Because the glue will act like a barrier and then you'll have
white spots so just put a very thin layer of glue. I have other tutorials on making
my dollhouse floors but for the purpose of this video I'm just doing this very quickly
because this isn't about making dollhouse floors this is just trying to show you how
to age those coffee sticks, so, a different animal all together here. Okay, i just start
putting my sticks down, Now on a real floor you'd probably want to stagger these. So you'd
cut them up and stagger them just like a real hardwood floor, but again, for the purpose
of this video and to speed things along, I'm just going to do them all one length. The
glue isn't dry yet. I've just washed off whatever seeped up in between them. Because I was going
so quickly, um, it did, some of the sticks did have some glue seeping up so I washed
that off with just a cloth and just water. Okay now I'm going to set a book on top that
and just leave it, leave it for about half an hour and make sure it's completely dry.
Look at the difference in color. So those sticks here, were just dipped once ion the
vinegar solution and let that dry, and look at the color. It does look like aged wood.
Each stick has a slightly different color to it than the next one. I love that. Alright
so I've done previous tutorials on working with these coffee sticks, they cut easily
with scissors, not a problem. Um, I've already done this edge here. So what I do, sometimes
when I'm working with a straight edge,I'll just use my x-acto knife, and I'm going to
score all those pieces laying over the edge. So I'm pressing down pretty hard. You just
want to make sure that the glue is completely dry. So you just want to check your, your
piece and, ah, try to lift it up a little, try to lift up one of the sticks, and if they
don't lift up then they're ready to be cut. Okay, now that I've scored them they should
just snap off easily. Okay, I'm ready to start brushing the vinegar solution on. So again,
I just took out the steel wool or strain it, whatever you want to do, into another bowl
so you just have vinegar left and the steel wool is gone.And now you're going to take
a paint brush, I'm just going to move this aside. So brushing it on.. And the smell is
quite pungent, you want to open up a window for sure or do it outside if you can. I just
put the hair dryer on this and took the majority of the moisture off so the wood is still damp,
I can feel it's still damp but the wetness is gone. So now I'm going to set it underneath
a book. But look at the color already! It's just been a couple of minutes, look how much
that changed. Alright, I'm going to set this aside for about an hour, um, you'll see even
more of a color change after about an hour. So because this was wet I'm just going to
put wax paper over top, then put my book. Alright this was the pre-treated side here,
and you can see just a little bit more of a color there with the 2nd coat so I'm thinking
that the, ah, um, other side that wasn't treated just needs to catch up, that's all. So there's
not really a difference you'll get between um soaking them in the vinegar or just brushing
the vinegar on. So you get the same effect. So that's, I was kind of curious about that,
just to see how it would turn out, if you'd get very much of a difference in the, ah,
colors but I think it's beautiful. I think that's absolutely beautiful. You can see all
the different, ah, variations in color, and each stick has a little bit of a different
tone to it. I love that. Alright guys, we are on day 3. And the reason why we are on
day 3 is because I wanted to try some things last night before I wrap up this video, just
to do a little bit of experimenting. But first I'll just show you the piece we were working
on together. So this side here was the pre-soaked pieces. You know, remember the, ah, the ones
we soaked for one minute and then glued them on, then I glued on the untreated wood, and
that's the difference. So I'm not sure why thre's such a big difference actually because
they have the same amount of vinegar on them. But pre-soaking them and letting them dry
before adding a vinegar again does make them a bit darker. Okay, and so this one here,
same thing, I'm not sure why it came out so dark? I guess the vinegar had been sitting
longer inside the steel wool and that's about 4 or 5 coats of vinegar, letting them dry
in between. Look at that gorgeous color. Beautiful. And then the untreated wood. And then this
one is the most exciting for me, I just love this. Um, last night I thought, I'm going
to try soaking them all night long. Okay so these ones here are ones that I soaked all
night long, I went to bed around 11, got up around 7:30, pulled them out of the vinegar,
let them dry and they actually turned out the same color as the ones that were soaked
for just one minute. So not much of a difference there. but this side! Lots of difference because
I took my pan, and I laid down sticks, just like this, side by side, nice and flat against
the pan, then I took a piece of steel wool and just opened it up and I dipped that in
vinegar. So it wasn't soaking or anything. I just dipped it in vinegar and I laid it
on top of the sticks like that, just laid it all on top so the sticks were all covered
and then left it alone. Got up this morning took the steel wool off and the sticks were
black, ah, sorry I forgot to turn on my video to show you but they were mostly black like
this color here and I could see some of the rust and then after they dried I got this
gorgeous, gorgeous , gorgeous color. i absolutely love that. You could use that in a old, ah,
scene, like a farm scene, you know? Maybe an old tractor was sitting on top of your
wood and it was rusting away there for years, that's the look you'd get! And one more thing,
I took a cloth, ah today, and I wiped the boards just to see what would happen and nothing
happened to these, this side. But on this side, I was able to take off some of the rust
so to keep that rust in place I would suggest sealing it in and I just used a water based,
satin, sealer. And brushed that on there and not that rust will stay in place. So there
you go guys, I hope that gave you some ideas, sparked some ideas for you anyway, um, to
build some floors or something else. You could build a door, and get different tones depending
on , on how you do it. Thanks so much for watching, I'll see you soon!