Cheap stuff

[Shadow]

My wife in her quest to buy cheap and also be ahead of the rest next year at Christmas, bought a bunch of decorations on sale after Christmas. Putting it away I noticed she had a bunch of tinsel which looked a lot like Flashabou and Holographic Flashabou. Priced at 25 cents a pack on sale ... what a deal. I of course grabbed it and have been bench testing the strength, size and also compaction under thread... results .. the same as Flash. Just for your info...

[Normand]

wait til you go to the big box craft shop with her. you'll swear you died and went to tying material heaven!

[NewTyer 1]

I use the left over tinsel when we undecorate the tree at Christmas. It works great and cheap too.

[Gandolf]

Hi Shadow,

Some of the colored icicles are excellent and some brands are very poor, with the color coming off. Be sure to test it in water. For what it's worth, I have used some brands of icicles for flash back with excellent results. The price can really be right.

Regards,

Gandolf

[WWKimba]

I bought some bags of the dollar store colored tinsel. I found it did not have the tensile strengh I wanted but was the color I wanted. I found that if I over wrapped the tinsel with mono and then head cement I had a pretty tough fly and the cement made the mono appear invisible. As usual, not an idea that was original to me - I saw this on "Flytying - The Angler's Art". If I remember correctly LeRoy Hyatt used this technique to attach stick-on eyes to a marabou "Mickey Finn".

[Shadow]

Thanks for the comments above... I water tested for a week and put it through stretch and compression tests... worked out great ... the only "big Box" store we have up here is {Michaels}... this summer I am heading down to Montana and will spend some time shopping for supplies.......

[maodiver]

I am waiting for the powers-that-be to start making krystal flash for the consumer market (icicles, packages, etc.) That stuff is priced way higher than need be, IMHO