Before you do anything else, put a little mineral spirits/paint thinner on a rag and wipe it on the wood. THAT is the true color of the wood. You can do the same thing with water but the water evaporates away so fast that you don’t get the look for long. The mineral spirits will evaporate away also, it just takes longer.
From the base color that you exposed, you would add some yellow or amber with most finishing clear coats. Polycrylic will be about as close to having no effect on the base color and the test above will probably be about the same color as what you got with the Polycrylic.
You really can’t “stain” lighter than the base color. Materials like the pickled oak stain have a lot of pigment which does not change the wood to a lighter color. It just puts a white mask over the base color, sort of like a thin paint that you later set in place with a clear coat finish. So the bottom line is that you can not get a color lighter than the base color of the wood unless you paint it in some method.
Henry in MI
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