It took me over ten years to decide to give tying a try. My son and I just started tying about this time last year. Over the course of the past year I have slowly weaned myself from the "store bought" to those I've tied myself. Now my box contains nothing but "my flies". But apart from the weird/incorrect proportions, substituted materials, or other abnormalities that make them "unique", you can't consider any of them "originals" regardless of how you define it. I'm too busy perfecting my tying of "classic" patterns to come up with anything of my own. But even with that being the case, I'm always ecstatic when a fly I've just learned to tie (regardless of how poorly) still manages to catch fish. I can only imagine what that would be like if the pattern was "an original".

---David