A friend from work gave me a ziploc bag with a bunch of porcupine quills and guard hairs. Now that they have been cleaned I was finally able to sit at my bench and play around with what is a new material to me. I will still keep them quarantined from the rest of my materials - I do this with all harvested materials.

Here is a mayfly pattern - I kept the quill in its natural color. The tails are porcupine guard hairs which were threaded through the quill. Looking at this photo I could have done a better job selecting partridge feathers for the wings - those are a bit ragged.



The second fly is a damselfly. This is a Harrison Steeves pattern in which I changed the body material from Kreinik braid to a porcupine quill and I also added some legs to the pattern. One thing I noticed is that the quills don't take permanent marker well, even after a 1 hour dry time the blue ink was still coming off on my hands. Anybody knows of a way to fix the color on the porcupine quills?



I hope you like the patterns. I need to think of other ways to incorporate the quills into other flies.

Alberto