Right on John. I jumped the wagon & went right to letters, in Cursive-Elegant yet - very script - very challenging too, but i wanted to see what I was up against. Just too impatient to get started. To top it off I tried the carving in poplar. Didn't you say poplar could be hard to carve. You are so right, and my knife easily passes the thumbnail/hair sharpness test too. I'm going to have to wait a while until I can go to the lumber yard to get some butternut, white pine & walnut wood. They don't have basswood. In the meantime I try practicing on the little 3" Sq. EZboard that came with the knife.

The mirror image transfer wasn't too bad. Not really good & sharp, but enough to easily guide the direction of the knife. I found it important to use the darkest black ink color on the fonts for both Word 2007 & Paint. I'll keep trying until my skills improve & I find it's not good enough, then will try graphite sheets. I'm not good at freehand penciling/painting so tracing might work out, but I'm not keen on doing a lot of erasing.

I've three of MB books due in so I'll check what he recommends for fonts.