Good. Come back and revive this thread if you're still having problems. :)
We're not trying to give you more of a headache, I swear, but in all honesty, if you really want to learn to theme WP on your own, you need a good understanding of how theming works for WP and that includes what makes the theme show up in your Admin theme selector.
... One last question, though:
You said you created customized files and have them all in a folder, yes?
Did you copy pre-existing files from a pre-existing theme or did you actually completely write new files for your theme from scratch?