Thank you for this post. As a newb, I concur - I find stropping properly to be difficult and is the lion's share of learning to shave with a straight. A nice edge makes shaving sooo much easier and enjoyable. I ruined an edge that Lynn Abrams put on my razor for me with stropping incorrectly, got it re-honed, and have since then gotten better at stropping, but it still needs work.

I'm glad you brought up the idea of evaluation. That's something I don't do so much. . . What do you do, just eyeball the edge to see where it's 'shiny' and 'less shiny'? I'm a little scared to do the thumb pad trick.