Blender Underground

Hi rookwings! I'm guessing that you're following Greybeard's tutorial, if it's the one from the blender.org site.

That tutorial was produced before UV Face mode was removed, so there will be at least one major difference (conceptually it's still a valid tutorial).

You'll need to have edges marked, where you want the UVs to be split. This is vital. In edit mode, use edge select mode, and select some edges so that the Unwrap tool can lay the thing flat. (In case you've never done an unwrap before: think of this like peeling an orange: if you want to lay an orange peel flat, you need to cut it in some fashion.)

The video will use UV Face select mode, but it's now done in regular edit mode. Once you have edges selected, use the CTRL+E menu and choose Mark Seam. You should see the marked seams on your model, and using U->Unwrap should change its behavior.

I hope this helps...

Thank you yet again, Apollos!
It is actually the "UV mapping and texturing" tutorial, by BigTallBill. I'm just floating around, trying to get to grips with enough to be able to understand lattices. I thought that tutorial might further my progress with converting older tutorials to apply to the current version of Blender. It seems I failed miserably with that one.
To update you, in case you were curious ( and I mean inquisitive, not peculiar, hehe), thanks to your advice, a few more failures, and another clean slate, I have eventually achieved a valid cube skin!!! YAY!!!
It seems that, if I had just pressed U AGAIN, after the first time (and getting something akin to the wrapping paper needed to enclose a bicycle, for example), the uv ed. screen would have shown me a nice flat cube!
I still know there's something I'm doing wrong, but thanks to the confidence your advice gave me, I have persevered and got what I was trying for!
It was the edge selecting thing I wasn't sure of. I couldn't find anywhere that told me to select edges for "mark edges" with edge select, vertex select, or face select, and my brain refused to organise the logic there.
Half the battle of understanding how to do things right is to understand how things went wrong.... so that's my task for this afternoon, I think.
Thank you again, Apollos, you are a star!

LOL! That had me laughing!!! I'm actually both...

i think the only thing that pissed me off about this mode leaveing is that one face always has the cheekered patteren thing on it... its frecken annoying and makes it hard to tell what you have selected. but other then that i think its good to keep the number of modes to a minimum.

[I often find that someone who isn't curious wasn't really worthy of attention]