Newbie having trouble with grid

[njdj]

Hi,
I have been a moderately skilled, non-professional user of Adobe Illustrator and I am trying to switch to Inkscape.  I am working on the first tutorial in Tavmjong Bah's book - creating a vector drawing of the Swedish flag.  I am stuck right in the very beginning at the creation of the grid.  It isn't the creation of the grid itself.  I followed all the steps and my entries in the Document Properties screen are all correct.  The problem is that I can barely see the grid.  I've tried making the color of the grid darker, but I still can only see a faint hint of the grid - or maybe I'm only imagining seeing the grid because I want it to be there.  I created the blue rectangle, which snapped to the edges of the rectangle, but when I tried to do the yellow crosspiece, it just wanted to fill up the rectangle again. 

Obviously, I'm doing something wrong and would appreciate some help.

Thanks in advance.

[njdj]

<smack> hand to head </>
i figured it out

[brynn]

Fyi, while those tutorials are probably mostly relevant, they are getting old, and they may not cover newer features which have become available. 

For those first couple of them, you probably won't miss much.  But when you get to the one about the hiking club logo, the features which are introduced have some much newer and exciting features which are not introduced.

They all still are teaching the necessary basics, and are totally worthwhile.  I just wanted to mention that newer features aren't introduced.

(Sadly, there is only one tutorial series which covers them:  http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981)