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…
wait til you go to the big box craft shop with her. you’ll swear you died and went to tying material heaven! 
I use the left over tinsel when we undecorate the tree at Christmas. It works great and cheap too.
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
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”.
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…
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