SECRETS OF PAINT AND STAIN CHEMISTRY

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The oil can be pressed from butternut husks by jury-rigging a powerful hydraulic press from a log splitter or car jack. For years, I've just collected the husks while they are still green, whacked them open and crushed them to a coarse pulp with a hand sledge on a flat (nonporous) rock. I then smear the pungent-smelling mash (quickly, before the oil evaporates) on pine or other common wood I want to color a nice brown (though my fingers get as stained as the wood).

Several coatings of the oil will go a long way toward rustproofing home-forged carbonsteel cutlery and tools, and is especially suitable for staining ax handles, scales for handles of homemade knives, leather thongs, and homespun cloth. It takes effort that's worth it if you are a pioneer-lays or Civil War reenactor or primitive-living fan, or have enough of an argument with modern technology to go that far back into the future.

Black walnut, chestnut, and buckeye husks will also produce brown oil-type stains, but they are less effective in amateur hands than butternut. A yellow penetrating-oil-type dye comes from the heart wood and the otherwise useless, hard inedible fruit of the Osage orange tree. All these aromatic oils are extremely pungent and act much like menthol or camphor to clear up nasal congestion and help with chest colds.

WATER-BASED STAIN/DYES AND FILLERS

You can cook a powerful brown water-soluble dye—tannin—out of crushed acorns, peat moss, or hemlock bark. It can be boiled down to a rich brew, but don't do it. Repeated applications of weak stain—let each dry before the next is applied—will give more control, thus more uniform results than a rich solution. If too much water is allowed to soak in, it will raise the grain of wood. But quick application and a little sandpaper will cure that.

Juice boiled up (with vinegar) or pressed out (with an old-fashioned clothes wringer cranked down tight) from wild plant stems, roots, flowers, and fruit produce colorful water-soluble dyes that were mainstays of our Indian and pioneer forbears. Most can be used as wood stains or fabric dyes, or mixed into water-based paints. Sheep people and wool dyers have whole cookbooks of recipes for natural colors, mordant, and other dye stuffs.

My own experience is limited to colors concocted for my own pioneer/primitive reproductions of furniture, weaponry, leather work, and clothing. I've boiled up a good yellow from the stems and a rich maroon from the ripe berries of staghorn sumac. If you've ever gotten mul berry juice on a white shirt, you know that these fruit produce an indelible purple stain. So do blackberries and beets.

I've found that if you shred outer leaves of red cabbage and boil them, you get purple. If you steam the cabbage, you get red. Either goes well to dye cloth or brighten cherry wood, red cedar, or California redwood. Natural deep-yellow saffron that is used as a flavoring in Spanish food as well as a dye for monk's robes comes from the pistils of an Asian variety of crocus; you can make a weaker version from your own flowers. It takes 4,000 flowers to get an ounce of powder, but a tiny fraction of an ounce goes a very long way.

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