Staining a desk

Factual Questions
1

I have just gotten a new unfinished hard wood desk for my girlfriend for Christmas. I will be finishing it at a friends place after work over the next week or so. I got detailed instructions on how to do this from the retailer and have already nicely stained several shelves myself, so that is no problem.

I want to personalize this, though, so I was thinking of including a message on the top of the base of the center pull out drawer. Hmm, that sounds confusing. Basically when you open the drawer above your legs you will see something written on the bottom.

I was thinking a good way to do this would be to write it in wax, stain the wood, remove the wax, and then poly the wood. Thus the message would be a negative image. Would this work? Would the stain bleed underneath the wax into the letters? If it would work, what kind of wax should I use? What would be a good way to remove it? I was thinking of using the basic paper bag and iron trick that works well for carpet.

The message itself would probably be just a simply cursive LOVE, but that will involve some narrow section and any bleed into might make it practically unrecognizable. I just picked the thing up yesterday so I was hoping to start today.

2

You could probably get away with it. Not much would bleed past even a basic wax. When staining furniture, alot of people forget to remove the tiniest glue spot, and it stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Heck, maybe you could write in wood glue, then stain it, then scrape the glue off, or sand it carefully. I’d be stunned if that didn’t work.

I built the desk I am writing at, and stained it and poly-ed it, and there is one spot where I wasn’t really thorough in removing the glue, and it drives me nuts because it will never accept stain.

3

I saw this recently on a decorating show and they used glue as well. They had a stencil they pounced glue in and it left very clear lettering behind.