Hey Scoop,

There's a few of issues at play here, and many people use different techniques to achieve varied results. From my own experiences I have found all of the following useful.

Firstly, If you are talking about a veneer, you need to sand as little as possible. Those things are *thin* and you can easily sand through. It stands to reason therefore that if you want to pop the flames with an initial stain, then you should do it as early as possible in the sanding process. I tend to use the initial stain not only to pop the figure, but also to show up any glue spots on the veneer. If you need to sand out any glue, you can touch these areas up with more stain if need be. This technique has saved me many times in the past.

Secondly, in general the "figure" in the veneer will take more stain than the wood around it. This is because the cells making up the figure typically go "into" the wood and not along the surface - they are "deeper" than the non figured grain. So the figure gets darker faster. Ths is why you can sand away the "shallow" stained cells leaving the stained figure behind.

Another way you can look at this is that the non-figured wood reaches its "saturation point" faster than the non-figured wood. So if you keep wiping stain over the veneer, the non-figured cells will quickly reach a point where they stop taking any more liquid, while the figure will continue to absorb more. There's a neat video on youtube from Canadianbreed guitars where the dude uses this fact to first apply a light stain to the whole top, and then a darker stain while the top is still wet. The darker stain goes into the figure beause the rest of the wood is saturated. You can get more dark stain into the figure by saturating the other parts of the veneer before application. This is balanced by the fact that too much water may cause the glue holding the veneer to loosen.

Finally, if you are using water-based stain then you can always pull colour back out of the veneer using a clean damp rag. In the same way that the stain in the figure goes deeper than the non-figured parts of the wood, this means that the figure is more reluctant to let go of its stain.

All of these fact are useful when thinking about popping your figure. Some might be useful to you. Or maybe I just waffled on too much.

cheers,
Gav.