The April-May edition of Fly Fisherman has a blurb in the “short Casts” section submitted by some fellow named Charlie Craven on an EZ way to blend dubbing. He suggests you take a zip lock bag, punch a couple holes in it, put the dubbing you want to mix in the bag, and squirt some “canned air” into the bag in short spurts.
I tried this today, and it works great. Much easier, to me, than messing with a coffee grinder. With the grinder, I always seemed to “overmix”, resulting in clumpy, unusable dubbing. Also, I only have the one grinder, and I use it once a year to grind up rosemary leaves for our Christmas rib roast, and there always seems to be a few odd fibers in the rub not in the recipe no matter how well I clean the grinder. (the rub is 1 part ground rosemary leaves, 1 part kosher salt, one part ground pepper, one part fresh pressed garlic; rub the roast liberally and bake 20 minutes per pound at 250 degrees, or til internal temp reaches 145 degrees…be prepared for a house full of aroma while cooking. After slicing, pick out any UV fibers or animal hairs in the crust prior to serving:))
If you try this, I suggest you use a small bag, like the ones dubbing comes in, and punch a couple holes in the bottom with a bodkin, put in the dubbing and seal the bag except leave a small opening for the canned air tube, hold the bag near the tube, and use short, quick spurts of air. Mixes thoroughly and quickly. It is easy to see the dubbing mix thru the bag, and it easy to see if you need to add more of the ingredients for the desired color. The small bag makes it easier to get the dubbing out, so mix in small batches.
Charlie also says this is handy for fluffing up commercial dubbing to make it easier to work with. I have used Mr. Craven’s website as a reference many times (http://www.charliesflyboxinc.com/flybox/), although I could not find this helpful hint referenced there.
Hopefully I have adequately credited the sources of this info
Curious how this works when making dubbing using synthetic yarns ala Doug Korn (which is the base for virtually all of my dubbings these days, even if I add natural fur or Ice Dub later).
A coffee grinder works as long as you don’t have long fibers or flash. Long fibers will bind in the blade, and flash can get chopped up pretty bad (depending on the type of flash.) Canned air works great, but if you have longer fibers it’s hard to get a good mix.
