Thats pretty awesome pete.....im inspired to max a credit card and whatever little space i have left for more stock to practice this....

I havent had any success with areole grafting and to tell the truth, am having a hard time understanding the reasoning for the horizontal cut like Inyan described....can anyone help explain??

Wakynian was right it is not more difficult than top grafting.
In fact I am not doing the horizontal cut too. I just lead the cut by razor down through the areole. Not too deep but not too shallow. Under the areole I push the razor towards the side of the stem, so it finishes the cut without the need to do the horizontal cut as Wakinyan was suggesting. I am not doing the horizontal cut because I feel I could damage the vascular bundles.

If done correctly, you can see the vascular bundle ring there. But I had success even when it was not visible.

If you are not sure where to position the graft, just do what I do, use 2 or 3 seedlings and then select the best runner.

When applying the parafilm, all seedlings are floating together, so it is easy to position them correctly before you fix the parafilm.

Thanks pete. Its still unclear to me though the reasoning for that cut but if its not completely necessary i will practice more and follow your way. The last time i attempted one i accidentally made that cut to deep and became frustrated and decided to wait until there was more stock to practice with.

I like the idea of just using 2 or 3 seedlings also. Im still a little unsteady when i lay the final piece of film over the seedling and i usually end up repositioning it a bit. May i ask what you mean when you say the seedlings are floating together??

I found it is very important to have the seedling fat. If it is not fat, I rather cut near the top, so it is not high, but rather thick. This allows me to move it on the rootstock when it is in contact with parafilm, but the parafilm is still not fixed yet. The movement of seedlings I called the "floating". If the seedling was high, it would fall over and wouldn't "float" on the rootstock.
I found it is always good to be prepared that positioning will be necessary rather than try to fit the parafilm at one shot. Sometimes I position as much as possible, slightly fix the parafilm to the rootstock, but not much yet, just a bit and then tighten the parafilm up slightly on the side where I want to move the seedling to the side.
So the first (and main) positioning is done with parafilm touching the seedling(s) from the top but not touching the rootstock. This I called "floating". Once satisfied with position, I attach the parafilm and tighten up.

I hope you get it, my English is poor

Ok i understand now. Your english is fine, was only a matter of terminology.

Even though i occassionslly reposition seedlings with the parafilm, ive still yet to run into any problems of them not taking. When i first started, i used to do something similar as you with attempting to fix their position, but the results i was getting led me to stop that practice. Whenever i acted slowly and unsurely is when i would run into the most problems. As long as i take my time in stretching the film properly before its applied, that faster approach works well for me.

Havent been doin much lately as far as grafting goes, just wanted to drop by with 1 or 2 pics.

The first is astrophytum super kabuto × capricorne

The others are l. alberto vojtechii

Very nice man!

A couple of the peres I thought were dead are growing again; time to get out the parafilm and have another crack at it

L. fricii v. albiflora (El Amparo)
A. myriostigma v. kikko
Both < 1 week old

It's been quite a while since anyone posted in here, but the lessons have most certainly been appreciated by me-- I would like to share a pic of several of my first grafts here for your enjoyment.

The seedlings were all started between 3 and 4 months ago-- making them quite a bit older than commonly recommended, but I was unable to graft them until recently because of a long-distance move to a different place.

I have finally settled in enough to begin-- here they are:
I will post picture updates in here instead of the other thread that pete started

Those are some nice crosses Coastal! I hope they all do well for you.

Thank you GF!

Today I noticed that 4 of them had the tiniest little red buds trying to grow at the nearest areole under the graft point, so I razored them off-- I take it as a good sign that the stock is pushing energy up to recover.

As soon as I see any visual progress (or problems) I'll post it here.

Lost label terescheckii hybrid with some nice variegation. Excited to see how this one turns out