I think my weekend DIY was a DI-Don't

Ryan and I found a great dry sink on Craigs List right before we moved. It was in pretty good condition it just needed the hardware changed and re-stained. I was thinking this would be fairly easy to do. So Sunday afternoon while Ryan was doing yard work I decided to get started. We have a hand sander so I didn't think it would be to bad to do. We were thinking we just needed to get the shine off the wood so the stain would stick. I sanded it all down and then we wiped it with a damp rag to get all the dust off. We had some stain left over from our new steps so we decided to use that instead of buying more, it was just a nice medium tone. The dry sink did not take the stain well, it looks terrible! I'm not really sure where we went wrong, so this week we are going to go to get a darker stain to try that. Hopefully I'll be able to post photos once we get it right.