Please Help!

[mcgaz89]

I am becoming quite frustrated with my razor.

I bought it in a bundle online including a badger hair brush, TI Le Dandy razor, TI strop paste (small white tube), and I think an executive-shaving short strop. It all came in a rosewood box with brass inserts which was very lovely, I still have it, but thats irrelevant. I don't think it was quite shave-ready out of the box but as a complete newbie I obviously thought it was and started shaving. I felt I had good levels of success but from seeing other posts and videos I think it could have been better. I loved it nonetheless.

The problem came when I tried to sharpen it with the TI strop paste. It just didn't work. The paste went everywhere and the razor didn't get any sharper. So I sent it away to be honed (The Invisible Edge I think) and it came back in better condition. After a shave or two it felt quite blunt and was tugging on my whiskers, almost more-so than before. Naturally I thought I'd buy a hone (Norton 4k/8k) but it didn't work so I bought a norton Flattening stone and used the grid technique to lap it down. Thats seemed to be a success and I tried to hone the razor with no success, so I bought a Nagura Matsunaga stone for slurry. Following the usual trend of events, it too was unsuccessful. I am now considering buying a 600ish grit and 1k stone to set a bevel thinking that the tools I am using are not right for the job, because what I am doing doesn't seem to be working. On the other hand I could just be doing everything wrong in which case getting someone else to hone it from scratch to sharp might be necessary.

Anyone got any advice? I want to keep going at this but I have heard that some people just don't pick it up .