I put in TONS of time on this rod as it was my brother's 25th birthday present; this was only my second cross, or diamond, wrap. The best advice I can give is that they get easier with practice (it helps to start out with good, concise instructions as well). Even though it's probably twice as many crosses as my first one, it probably took less time. For those of you who don't want to do 15 on 15 different blanks, it's only the cost of thread to wrap, remove, and rewrap several times on the same blank until you get precisely what you're going for!

I've realized this before, but I didn't plan for it. When I had the cross wrap, unfinished in front of me, it looked great. I knew I wanted to keep the colors as vibrant as possible, so I did a thorough job of applying color preserver. None the less, when you put finish on top of the thread, it still darkens! So next time I do a cross wrap with dark base colors on a dark blank, I will be sure to pick at least one true highlight color to make it stand out more...perhaps instead of doing the border in black I should have done silver?!

Another thing I picked up happened much earlier, maybe 2 months prior, when I turned the grip that I used on this rod. I noticed that it's really easy, when only using hand pressure, to grind away at the natural cork much faster than the burl cork...what ends up happening is that you can even get ridges that form where the harder burl cork meets with the natural cork. It helps to have some blocks of wood and/or dowels around...if you do it with straight hand pressure you end up with the natural cork being divits!