+1 on taping, always.Also, always mask off the fretboard by the nut and the first 5cm or so of headstock. Also the side of the neck round the nut. It doesn't take long to do, but it can save you a lot of grief and repair time.
Personally I would have gone with Fender-size blanks and shimmed the tuner side of the slot with veneer. A whole lot less work and more than acceptable cosmetically IMO.The nut blanks are 5mm thick and the nut slot is between 3.1 and 3.6mm wide. All I could find in the Fender sized bracket were 3mm.
I have two types of veneer I keep on hand for shimming nuts. Jarrah and Pine. The Jarrah with a touch of walnut stain will match rosewood near perfectly, and Pine can be tinted to match maple really closely.
It's visible from 6" away, but more than passable from a distance.
One way to rough in the nut blank is by measuring the first fret height (with good calipers or stacked feeler gauges) then add .010 to that number.- Get the height much closer to the real height before starting to cut the slots. I had to cut through way too much material before I was in the right ball park.
Stack the feeler gauges to that thickness and put up against the nut (with nut in slot). The gauges will flex to whatever the radius is. Then with a fine lead mechanical pencil draw a line across the face of the nut at the top of the gauges.
This will give you two things. How much you can safely take off the top of the nut, and a preliminary target for roughing in the string slots.
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