Hey guys, thought it would be cool to make a couple of throwing knives that attached to ribbons to be used for a kinda martial arts weapon.

This is the basic idea so far. Any more suggestions?
I feel some of it is a bit boring.. But I want to make it simple.

(I'll be putting a rough diamond surface in the normals for part of the centre handle. Not textured.)

The only real suggestion I can give is to be careful at 3/4 shots. I assume this is in maya? Most renderers default their camera FOV to something very high, allowing you to see a lot when working but they foreshorten the crap out of individual assets. Whatever your final render is in; maya, marmoset, UDK, just be aware of the foreshortening. I see it ruin too many knives.

Is it acceptable to resize smaller objects just to fill missing spaces that can't be filled otherwise?

How about just making the texture 512 x 1024? The UVs would probably fit better that way!