gilding
One of my projects for this weekend was to try to gild some of the trim pieces for my organ. I found it to be a very gratifying and surprisingly forgiving process, so I wanted to commend it to any amateur builders or decorators out there. For my first attempt I started with some ~2 1/2 " x 5" blocks (~6 x 12 cm lest the metric police get me) with coved edges that go on the front of the pillars at the top of the organ. I decided to gild the coves, a suitably small project on which to practice. I bought a gilding kit from Sepp which included the essentials but probably wasn't worth the extra cost vs just buying the things I needed. I was thinking the "instruction book" would add value, but the instructions given weren't much longer than this posting and were, in fact quite sufficient. I used 23K gold leaf that came on tissue paper. Trying to handle it without the tissue paper backing would have been incredibly difficult. After giving the painted surface a light sanding I primed it with the yellow gilding primer and allowed that to dry. I gave it another very light sanding to remove brush marks and applied the adhesive. The only tricky part of the process was determining how long to wait before applying the gold. I started the first one too soon and got a dull surface as a result, with what looked like primer showing through. The gold actually seems to be somewhat permeable to the adhesive, I was able to fix my mistake by letting it dry a while longer and then applying a second layer of gold. The other pieces were left to dry for an additional hour and the first layer of gold gave a bright shiny finish. A quick burnish with a piece of cheesecloth to remove stray bits and make sure the gold was well adhered and the project was done. This took a little longer (mostly waiting time for things to dry) than applying gold colored paint and probably cost an additional $2-3 over the cost of paint for the eight blocks, but the result looks way better than paint and will stay shiny for a very long time to come. I thought it was easier to get a smooth, neat finish than with paint as well. All-in-all a very pleasing project. There's really no reason not to go for the real thing. Cheers, Roger
One of my projects for this weekend was to try to gild some of the trim pieces for my organ. I found it to be a very gratifying and surprisingly forgiving process, so I wanted to commend it to any amateur builders or decorators out there. For my first attempt I started with some ~2 1/2 " x 5" blocks (~6 x 12 cm lest the metric police get me) with coved edges that go on the front of the pillars at the top of the organ. I decided to gild the coves, a suitably small project on which to practice. I bought a gilding kit from Sepp which included the essentials but probably wasn't worth the extra cost vs just buying the things I needed. I was thinking the "instruction book" would add value, but the instructions given weren't much longer than this posting and were, in fact quite sufficient. I used 23K gold leaf that came on tissue paper. Trying to handle it without the tissue paper backing would have been incredibly difficult. After giving the painted surface a light sanding I primed it with the yellow gilding primer and allowed that to dry. I gave it another very light sanding to remove brush marks and applied the adhesive. The only tricky part of the process was determining how long to wait before applying the gold. I started the first one too soon and got a dull surface as a result, with what looked like primer showing through. The gold actually seems to be somewhat permeable to the adhesive, I was able to fix my mistake by letting it dry a while longer and then applying a second layer of gold. The other pieces were left to dry for an additional hour and the first layer of gold gave a bright shiny finish. A quick burnish with a piece of cheesecloth to remove stray bits and make sure the gold was well adhered and the project was done. This took a little longer (mostly waiting time for things to dry) than applying gold colored paint and probably cost an additional $2-3 over the cost of paint for the eight blocks, but the result looks way better than paint and will stay shiny for a very long time to come. I thought it was easier to get a smooth, neat finish than with paint as well. All-in-all a very pleasing project. There's really no reason not to go for the real thing. Cheers, Roger