Follow up. I did use Jim's idea a bunch and its definitely a honey, will continue to do that. I had a can of 3M 45 spray adhesive in the cabinet so used that and it works just dandy for this. I actually just sprayed a half sheet of 220 grit and then stuck a whole bunch of splints (some offcuts from the scrap heap worked a charm) to it and then cut the sandpaper apart with a box cutter around each splint once the glue set. I now have a whole stack in the sanding bin
I also picked up the LV Detail Riffler set of 4. These are
very fine rifflers and leave a surface comparable with say good quality 150 grit sandpaper (and perhaps a bit better if you take a light finish pass). I ended up with 2 of the #2 curved rifflers because they accidentally sent me two of those instead of one of the #3's (as per the usual superlative LV service they let me keep the extra #2 and sent me the missing #3). I'm actually pretty tickled about that because the #2 is my favorite out of the set and works really well for both getting into little cracks as well as smoothing outside curves (I'm surprised at this because I expected it to be awkward in use but its not). I'm not in love with the #1 so far, its hard to get a long enough stroke to be useful, but I could perhaps see it working well where you have a longer profile (leaves/vines? maybe?) than what I've been working on. I haven't tried the #3 much because of the delay, tentatively I'm putting it on par with the #2 but perhaps less flexible in use. The #4 seemed a bit awkward in use, again there are probably some shapes where it may work very well but I'm not sure what it would be.
I also picked up a set of needle files. There is one side round and the other flat that also tapers to a point that is pretty much all I've used from the set, its by far the handiest. Its also quite handy for pre-sanding cleanup of small details; worth having. I'm not sure how it would compare to a set of swiss pattern, I think they are slightly coarser in general.
Since then I've finished one more spoon with braids and knots (gave away before I could take pics, sorry - the handle was a three strand braid with two stacked manrope knots for the gripping part and a single strand variant of the manrope as a junction between the braid and the bowl) and am ~most of the way through another (will follow up on the spoon thread once done). I was with loml on a wool spinning class for a week and carved/napped while she was doing that so had some time to play
and I can say that at least the #2 detail from LV is well worth it for cleanup if you do much of this type of carving. It made smoothing the braid and knots after going over them with the rougher rifler way way easier.