Now when you cut your piece of veneer for scorching you can either cut your piece  slightly oversize, or you can cut it to fit the “window”, the choice is yours. Do bear in mind that the hot sand applied to the veneer will cause the veneer to shrink a little due to the effect of the heat causing some of the moisture in the wood to evaporate, so it will be necessary to put some moisture back into the veneer to bring it back to it’s original size, this you can do by just putting the scorched veneer into your mouth, obviously, make sure its cooled slightly otherwise you’ll burn yourself. If you elect to cut your piece of veneer oversize then it will only be necessary to trim your veneer to fit your window and then you will avoid having the taste of scorched veneer in your mouth.

I would recommend that you lightly pencil the area you want to scorch for your own guidance when applying the hot sand. Don’t forget to apply the sand to both sides of your veneer so that you get penetration of the “scorch”.

When you apply the hot sand to the veneer, scorch slightly over the area you require, because you will lose some of the scorched effect when you come to sand your picture down.

You cannot really get the scorching effect with dark woods, for example, a walnut, you can try sand scorching if you wish but you are not going to make hardly any impression on it at all. If you use a light walnut, it could perhaps be used to depict a corner of a room or ceiling.

Now, if you have a fair number of pieces to scorch, just scorch a few of these first and put them back into your picture, then do another few and put them in your picture, and carry on with this procedure until you have done all the pieces you wanted scorched for your picture.

A question from the audience: “You don’t moisten the veneer until after you’ve scorched it Alf?”  “Yes, that’s right, now if you assume that the piece of veneer you’ve just scorched is going back into your picture, you’ll probably find that there is now a gap around it even though it fitted perfectly before you scorched it, this will be due to shrinkage caused by moisture loss because of the effect of the hot sand, now you can overcome this problem by applying a little moisture, even the white PVA glue will help the situation. If you are not happy with this shrinkage problem you can overcome these drawbacks by just cutting your veneer oversize, sand scorching it and then cutting it into your window in the normal manner”.

Do not try placing hot sand into the middle of a leaf of veneer because it will start curling up and you will be unable to do anything of any practical use with it.

I must say that I’ve not had any real success with chemically treated veneers either. You can sometimes see a light scorching taking place, but it in no way compares with the depth of the effect you get when you scorch the white veneers.

Now do bear in mind that the sand in the centre of the tin is going to be the hottest, so don’t go plunging your veneer into that part of the hot sand and then after a while bring it out from that part of the sand only to find that you now have a charred piece of veneer, it is far better to control the application of the hot sand by pouring it on your veneer with the spoon. As I said before, with small pieces you will not be able to do that, but with your larger pieces do use the spoon to apply the sand onto your veneer, leave it for a few seconds then pour the sand back into the tin. You can repeat this process until you’ve achieved the depth of scorching that you require.

If you take a look at the roses on the demonstration board you will find that they’ve scorched just right, they show about the right amount of shadow and depth, after all, you do not want the wood blackened by over doing the amount of scorching.

Alf: “anyone like to have a try?” Vicky volunteers.

Alf: “I’ll just check that the heat’s okay for you” Vicky now applies some hot sand to a piece of test veneer by using the spoon method.

Alf: “there you are, you can see the discolouration taking place, now turn it over and do the other side, ------ there, that’s now a sufficient depth of colouring”

Dave Walker: “don’t forget to place the veneer in your mouth to resize it!”