Whenever possable buy your feathers on the skin and not loose in a bag, when you buy the skin nature has sorted the sizes for you, when you buy feathers in a bag it is like sorting through a pillow to find the right size.
Eric
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Whenever possable buy your feathers on the skin and not loose in a bag, when you buy the skin nature has sorted the sizes for you, when you buy feathers in a bag it is like sorting through a pillow to find the right size.
Eric
Keep a shotgun near your tying area, because when the zombie apocalypse comes along and the dead rise, all of those animal parts are going to be looking for a fight. :D
On a more serious note, whenever you tie a fly with a floss body, try tying it with a similar color of fine dubbing tight on the thread. It's a nice effect!
I got a book here on tieing....says to take ALL ( repeat..ALL) your feathers OFF the skin...and put them into containers marked as to size. Grizzly; brown; black....dont matter. Toss all of size "X" into the same container?????
Aint no way in H*** am I ever going to do that!!!!
You guys are reading my mind, or staring over my shoulder as I type and photograph what I hope will be the most complete book of fly tying tips and techniques ever attempted with out the use of a net.
You are all quite correct about the wealth of information to be found on this website. and the difficulty accessing specific information as well. The Tying Tips Book will be arranged into catagories, in so far as possible, so that you can find related tips together in a handy format.
Hopefully by summers end it will be available to you as a downloadable Ebook.
I'll keep you posted on the progress
George
Hi All,
When tying at either of my kids families houses, I put feathers and fur back in boxes, because one set has a dog, and the other set has two cats. (I learned the hard way. Fortunately I learned with relatively inexpensive wet fly hackle.)
Regards,
Gandolf
An emery board and a dryer sheet go a long way in making your hands smooth and eliminating static.
What Mikey said!!!!
To lay down a smooth thread underbody, start the thread near the head, but don't cut off the tag. Hold it taut and wind against it; this keeps the thread wraps touching but not overlapping.
Learn to use measure against the hook to get proportions correct. For example, if the tail is supposed to be one hook shank long, actually lay the material against the hook and measure it to determine the tie-in point. "Supposed to be" is a relative term; if you like a shorter or longer tail, adjust accordingly, but still measure. Almost everything you tie to the hook has some length that you want to compare to the length of the shank, the gap, the eye, etc. Most of these proportions have a standard (e.g. dry fly hackle "should" be one and a half times the gap of the hook) but the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them (e.g. the old standard for hackle length was twice the gap.) Pick the one you like and stick to it.
The fact that fish sometimes seem to prefer scruffy looking flies is not a good excuse for sloppy tying. If you want scruffy, tie a pattern that looks scruffy when well tied. Poorly tied flies will indeed take fish, but they also fall apart more easily. (OTOH, fish your mistakes anyway. If the choice is to throw the fly away now, or take a fish or two with it before it falls apart, you might as catch the fish.)
Take part in swaps, and tie twice as many of the pattern as the swap requires. Swap the good looking ones, fish the rest. As tempting as it is to tie a different pattern every fly, you really do learn more tying a lot of the same pattern -- even if it's one you think you tie perfectly now.
Yep, just listen to the old timers :rolleyes:
lets try not to repeat what someone else posted[/QUOTE]Quote:
do you have any other tip and tricks to add??