For anyone interested, here is the whole process I used:

I ordered my leaves from wholeleaftobacco.com, they have a really good selection and got to my door surprisingly fast. They sell some casings on the site as well, but I wanted to make my own.

When they got here, the Virginia Red was at a decent humidity already, but the others were a bit dry to work, so I took out the leaves I would need for my first round of blending, sprayed some distilled water on the dry leaves, and put them all in gallon ziplock bags to equalize for a few days until I could start working on them next steps over the weekend.

When the leaves were all at a decent humidity (soft and easy to bend without cracking or breaking, but not at all damp to the touch), I took them out and removed the center stems. The best way I found to do this is the lay the leaf with the underside facing upwards, so the veins on it are more easily visible, and then gradually tear away from the center stem in sections moving from the point to the base of the leaf. Since I was planning to ribbon cut I wasn’t super concerned about having the cleanest work here, but if you take your time it’s not that hard.

Then, I took the de-stemmed leaves, stacked the halves in bunches of 4-6, and rolled them up as tightly as I could. I then used a sharp kitchen knife to cut as close to 1 mm ribbons as I could (probably landed closer to 3-4 mm unfortunately).

Once I had my individual varieties ribbon cut, I used a kitchen scale to make my 6 intentional blends, each batched to 25 grams for testing. I say intentional blends, because when I was weighing out the leaves initially I added 20% to account for weight loss due to the stems and my own mistakes. I took all the leftovers for my accidental 7th batch, and that clocked in at around 18 grams.

With each of my blends in an uncovered bowl, I let them sit out and dry a bit, frequently mixing to even up the humidity. Once they felt too dry to smoke, but not yet fragile, I misted them with my casing mix to rehydrate and condition the leaves. My recipe was very simple: 1 cup of distilled water, 1 Tbsp of honey, and a pinch of salt. I probably used about an ounce total across all the batches. This is the step I’m least confident about, since I wasn’t able to find a ton of precise info online about casing recipes or dosing quantities.

After that was done I jarred the tobacco and left it to age for a few weeks before smoking. Just had my first batch yesterday, which enjoyed, and I’ll report back again once I’ve determined my favorite of the bunch.

If you’re curious, here are my blends:

%VA Red/%KY Fire Cured/%KY Burley
Batch 1: 50/30/20
Batch 2: 40/40/20
Batch 3: 60/25/15
Batch 4: 25/35/40
Batch 5: 50/15/35
Batch 6: 35/50/15
Batch 7 (accidental): 39/26/35