After being home sick for the day on Friday, I decided to get up Saturday and look over my supplies. To my surprise, I found that I had enough components to build up a rod. I have a few extra blanks that I picked up on clearance, so I decided that it was time to build one up for my 8 year old son to learn on. I picked a Forecast 7'6" 4 pc 4 wt (one of my favorite blanks to build for beginners). He picked out purple thread with 3 turns of silver trim, and I decided to finish it without CP (a first for me). I wrapped on my standard Forecast black frame/black ceramic ring fly guides, a full wells grip and a black A7 seat. Nothing fancy, but just the ticket for an 8 year old boy to learn with (and probably abuse to some extent).
This was probably one of the smoothest builds that I've ever done. I started first thing this morning, and had the whole rod on the dryer by about noon. I guess I am learning. I remember some of my earlier rods where wrapping on a guide often took 30 minutes. It does feel good to see some tangible evidence that I'm making progress.
I'm not sure about the no CP yet. The thread darkened a lot more than I imagined it would, and appears to be similar to cobalt, only a shade or 2 darker than that even. I'll hold my final judgement until I can see it outside in the sun, though.