WOW, TXS kev. I plan on buying points when the new tuts. are released.

Ritualistic
here are two shots of what to do.
The image was put together in about 5 minutes

I built sword from poly's extrude. than I selected the faces of the metal part and extracted so I can apply a shader to it.

the handle: I selected the fron faces and planar mapped them. This sometimes works far better then automatic mapping. You can get quick resuts this way.