IT'S DONE!!! I ACTUALLY FINISHED IT! I FINISHED ANOTHER CRAFTY THING AND IT TURNED OUT WELL I'M SO HAPPY!!!
I'll post another thing in a minute with pictures but I wanted to talk about things I did in this post. So first of all, thanks heaps tisziny and evilislikeevildoes for telling me your opinions :) I got such mixed reports from everyone I asked that I decided to just do both the gold paint and the thread around the edge, and thankfully it turned out well, and the thread helped define the edge of the paint.
I ended up carving a groove in the middle of the blade, which turned out ok - a bit wonky, but it doesn't really matter and this was my first time carving anyway.
Also, since the reference picture I used had a little band of writing around the blade near the hilt, I did the same thing. I couldn't see what the writing was, so I decided to come up with a name for the dagger and write that in Ancient Greek. The name I came up with was 'protector', and I got that from the story of the dagger from The Demigod Diaries - how the girl who gave it to Hal (who gave it to Luke) said it would protect its owner. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, seeing as I don't speak Ancient Greek, but I looked it up and it was an image from an English-Greek dictionary, so I went with it. It looks pretty cool but the letters are a little messy.
So yeah, that's pretty much it :) I just wanted to get all my thoughts down and this is a great medium to do it, seeing as hardly anyone's probably going to read this.