Natural and imitation

[pittendrigh]

Overall length: 1-3/4" inch
Hook: #6 standard length hook
Body: brown-dyed mattress foam, slit at the front end
Tails and legs: brown mottled rubberlegs
Weight: wrapped, soaked with CA and squashed-with-pliers-lead
Fuzz: yellow dubbing glued to the flattened lead wraps
Thread: flat brown nylon

We can imitate visual appearance, wiggling or animated action in the water, texture and smell. Most flies target appearance only. Action is tough, but sometimes possible. Smell is generally considered bad practice. Texture is a largely new frontier. Texture matters. Fish bite fat soft flies and hang on and chew--which does make them a lot easier to catch. ....more about Marshmallows....

[gpatton]

Looks like it will work well. Where did you get the mattress foam?

[ScottP]

You think furry foam would work?

Regards,
Scott

[pittendrigh]

RE> "where'd I get the foam?" ...it's just cheap open cell polyurethane mattress foam. The kind college students sleep on. I put it in a tub of brown Rit dye for a few days.

RE>"would Furry Foam work?" ....sure. Furry Foam is good stuff. It's too thin for making big Pteronarcys Salmon Fly nymphs. But fine for littler ones. The 'fish hang on and chew' behavior doesn't seem to happening so much with smaller nymphs however. I make big stonefly nymphs and minnows with foam. Fish will sometimes swim 20' with those, chewing on them the whole way. I have thrown a big foam minnow into a pod of spawning rainbows--males mostly, competing for the one female on the redd. The dominant male hit the foam streamer 5 or 6 times (I intentionally did not set the hook). A Woolly Bugger he'd bite only once. I've seen high altitude cutthroats hit foam minnows two or three times too.

[Silver Creek]

Have you put it in the water?

[pittendrigh]

RE> "Have I put it in the water?"

;=))

The above photo (at the top of this thread) is my latest work. I did first publish the Marshmallow Nymph in 1991, in Fly Fisherman.
I have lots of oddball fly patterns. The Marshmallow Nymph is one of the best big-fish patterns I have. Especially in the early season, leading up to the Salmon Fly hatch and for the next ten days or so after the main hatch has moved on upstream. These flies will catch fish at any time. But they are at their best in the early season. Including during the actual hatch.
==> Original FF Article <==

[pittendrigh]

I don't have a photo-tying sequence.

I cut a foam body blank to length and split the front half with scissors.
Put a #10 beading needle horizontally in the vise. And then skewer the abdomen onto the needle.
I tie on tightly at the rear end, fastening two long lengths of rubber legs, pinching down tightly to the temporary needle. Whip finish a few turns at the end of the abdomen.

Then I wind forward, wrapping LOOSELY every now and then, to segment the body.
Whip finish behind the slit. Pull the body blank off the needle. Sew the two loose rubberleg ends through the upper half of the body, so they protrude outwards at a forward angle, vaguely similar to a pair of antennae. The last paragraph below explains rubberleg sewing in greater detail.

Put a hook in the vise. Double wrap with wire (soft brass or lead). Soak with CA glue.
Quickly squash the wire wraps with smooth-jawed needle nose.

Put a small bead of CA glue on one side of the wire wraps. Hold some combed yellow dubbing across for a few seconds. Breath on the wet CA glue, so the moisture in your breath kicks off the glue. Now the horizontally-oriented yellow dubbing is securely fastened to the hook.

Poke the point of the hook into the back end of the slit body. Wrap thread onto the shank at the eye. Lash down the two front ends of the slit body so it covers both sides of the wire-wrapped shank, and so the antennae point forward and outward appropriately.

Take the fly out of the vise. Use a wide-eyed rubberleg needle to sew a few more rubberlegs into the thorax. To make a rubberleg needle I start with a narrow-shanked but big-eye sewing needle. Heat the eye to cherry red with a lighter. Use needle nose to jam the red needle eye down onto the point of another needle. Now you have a sewing needle with an extra-extra wide eye. Which you can use for sewing rubberlegs or bundles of fibers into foam body blanks of all kinds.....useful for sewing into both closed-cell and open-cell foam.

Here's the adult, made with closed-cell foam and similar tying techniques: