Peeling Back Time

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Pictured, the old and rather beautifully battered chess table top undergoing its transformation from toffee-apple confection to honest patination. You can see the weird 'varnish' someone rather stupidly chose to slather the thing with [to what end?] at the top of the image. It appeared to me to have been given a coat of shellac in some misbegotten fever-dream of a restoration idea. Wrong on so many fronts, let alone the aesthetic one. As you can see, the removal of this crud reveals a perfectly honest table that wears its history on its sleeve. It's never going to look like it did when the original maker constructed it, but I really don't care about that: it is what it is, and the wear and tear of its use over the decades, along with its weathering and damage, just gives it character in my book: there's something rather endearingly Gormenghast about it. After finishing peeling the orange muck off it, I gave it a rub down with wire wool and an initial coat of beeswax. I also determined that it wasn't actually in fact originally a tilt-top table as I first thought it might have been, but I fancy I'm going to change that, and make it so, anyway. Keep you posted on progress...

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