"Gary" wrote in
:

....
I an so disappointed it this mess. I had a really nice cabinet in the
works that I was proud of and now its a ****ty brown mess. I have no
idea of how to remedy this mess other than paint it white and stick it
in my garage.

Hi Gary,

I have only used water-based aniline dye followed by oil and shellac
topcoat on maple, so you may want to take this with a grain of salt ...
but in my experience aniline dye always looks very dull and muddy after
application and frequently the color tone is skewed way toward the
bright side. In addition, the unevenness of the dye is accentuated. I
suppose this is because of the combined effect of the grain raising and
drying and the dye penetration. Fortunately, every time I've tried it
the topcoats eliminate all the muddiness and most of the nonuniformity,
and they also shift the tone toward the warmer side. In other words,
the appearance of the piece after application of aniline dye bears
little resemblance to the piece after the dye has been topcoated.

Using a fair sized piece of scrap, you may want to test the full
application of dye plus topcoat and see if the result is closer to what
you expect.

If you find that your dye application is really badly uneven, then you
might want to try rubbing it to better uniformity with a rag wetted with
the same solvent used for the dye application (as other posters
suggested). Also, you could improve the uniformity a bit by using a
little more aniline (wipe on and off quickly with a rag); this will
help the uniformity but each application of aniline is cumulative in
darkening the piece.

Anyway, hang in there. Test the full finish sequence on a scrap board
and see where you are. Hey, the worst thing that can happen is that
you're in for a lot of scraping and sanding.