[Insert Straw Pun Here]

Projects like this are just tedious. Enjoyable, yes. But tedious.
My art teacher bought bags of hundreds of straws to throw in the ocean, but we ended up using them for art instead.

This was exactly the technique that came to mind when presented with the material, and self-portraits are always a great way to test a new medium. You tend to know, having done enough of them, if it's good or not. There's less worry of "oh, did the new medium just make this one reference look really good?" and more of "oh. I now have my face made out of straws staring back at me."
The main takeaway from this was a lesson on measurement precision. When measuring large numbers of things that need to be equal, the line you're measuring them against must have as thin of a line as possible. What I mean by that is you cannot use a thick black sharpie to draw the line you're measuring each straw against to cut. This increases the range of results way too much. Even most rulers have a larger range of results than I would recommend for this project. Whatever wasn't measured exactly can normally be sanded, but with straws it gets a bit difficult.
I would put a straw pun here to close, but they all suck.