Also note that you need to stress relieve your spokes so you don't have parts of the elbows which didn't make it past their elastic limit during the forming process fail early due to fatigue. Presumably the same things could happen at the end of the threads if you neglected correcting spoke lines and/or stress relieving.

I like twisting spokes around each other at their outer crossing with a brass drift (anything softer than the spokes will work like a plastic screw driver handle or old left crank arm) although you can also squeeze near parallel pairs _hard_ (gloves make that more comfortable).