Take a little square section block of wood, carve out a channel on one side, fill with BluTak. Voila, you can grab your slip of cane and it won't let go for nothing. No more licking digits! Ewww.
You can push like a son of a gun too. Good luck doing that with just saliva's surface tension. I always despised sanding slips down, way more than any of the other steps in reedmaking. This makes the process a snap, relatively speaking anyway. Another thing I've taken up is using a belt sander to smooth down staples, instead of futzing around with files. Think I wrote about that elsewhere. Much faster and accurate, well for me at least.
Although my reeds do look like reeds, not dinky canoe paddles, like so many do.
