As my material inventory increases and my money decreases, I am finding myself looking for other ways to get tying material.
I just went out to the local fly shop and bought a section of fuzzy tying foam, only to get it home and find it was a square of tan velour blanket material? For the price I paid for a six by six square, I?m sure I could have gone to Walmart and bought a square yard in the cloth department.
Anyways, here some other things I have found:
The nylon yarn at Walmart costs 25 cent for ten yards, come in a dozen colors, and looks just like Antron yarn that costs much more for much less yarn.
The 5-Minute clear epoxy that sells for $5.00 at fly shops is $1.97 at you-know-where, same brand, same size.
Kroger supermarket is selling the thin metallic Flashabou right now in caddis green, blue, and shrimp pink. They?re disguising it as Easter basket grass and selling it for $1.50 in a bag large enough to cost over twenty dollars at your local fly shop.
I work doing service in several factories around the state. Each factory has ear plug stations. The foam ear plugs are connected with vinyl tubing in cicada orange, blue, red, or catalpa worm yellow/green.
I?m sure we can all think of things like this. Maybe you could share your ideas.
Alan
Cut long thin strips off of zip lock bags for three dimensional looking bodies. You can also use the thicker strips of the zipper part wrapped around the hook they make great looking ribs.
I made some Doc Spratleys out of hair I got off the floor when my buddy Dan got his hair cut.
We call them Dan Spratleys and they work better than the Spratleys we made out of feathers.
I will buy some of the brighter colors from walmart. They seem to tie fine and are very cheap. I don’t see any noticable difference so if you need some easy to get, inexpensive thread, that’s where I would go.
BC
Alan,
A lot of fly tying materials were not originally meant for fly tying. Innovative tyers found new materials and sometimes new patterns to use them on. Examples include Chadwicks 477 yarn, copper wire, Antron (carpet fiber), furry foam (Vellux blanket), etc.
Of course these materials can still be found (other than the Chadwicks) from their original sources. Once you start doing this, you have reached level one. This merely saves you money as a benefit of knowing some fly tying history.
If you realize that fly recipies are not burned into rock tablets, and you start substituting/altering recipies with new materials then you have reached level two. This can be a fun and interesting way to discovery better fish catchers.
Once you have an epiphany and realize that new materials can open the way to new recipies, then that is level three and you are walking in the footsteps of the fly tying innovators.
Is there a level four? Yes… at that level, you can catch plenty of fish on a bare hook
I guess I would consider myself in the beginning stages of level 2 although if I am not careful my wife will take me straight to level DEAD. I used a baggy of really good looking yellow brownish hair I found on the kitchen table to tie up a couple dozen nymphs this stuff was amazing and i cussed myself for taking it out of it’s original packaging it was very fine yet kinda stiff and soft at the same time. Come to find out it was what was left from my sons first haircut so instead of a bag of hair in his baby book he now has a wonderful fly stuck in a small piece of cork. I can’t wait for him to need another haircut I am running low on Kenny nymphs. Oh and dog hair works very well, I brush my labs almost weekly just for this reason , I have both yellow and black and am considering getting a chocolate so I can expand my tying a bit more.
Steve
If you ever have the fortune, (or misfortune depending on your opinion of my old home town), to visit NYC on a weekday with time to kill; take a walk through the side streets of the Garment District. I’m talking from 40th Street to Penn Station between 8th & 7th Avenues.
In the shops at street level you can find just about every imaginable kind of material used to make everything you will see in your favorite clothing store.
I used to get LOTS of free samples.
While I used to get mine from the furriers in the Fur District below Penn Station; a visit to your local furrier can yield a TON of scraps if you can get by the scruffy exterior of a guy that spends his whole day making little strips of fur into big strips of fur. I have a lifetime supply of fox, beaver, muskrat, raccoon, mink, and even some seal & chinchilla!
Indian Feathers (for kids Indian headdress and other art projects) are nothing more than dyed matched duck quills in various colors to use for quill section wet fly wings. Loctite CA Superglue in the “Easy Brush” bottle is cheaper than Zap-A-Gap. Craft beading wire is fine wire used for ribbing. Black plastic garbage bag strips instead of Thin Skin. Iridescent (pearl) gift wrap paper for overbodies on Crease Flies and for flashback when cut into strips (or Christmas tree tinsel). I just went to a JoAnn superstore and got about six yards of iridescent pearl mylar braid tubing there for $1.19 a yard in addition to more Darice shag (long) craft fur in black and white, and a skein of white Boa yarn. I already get the hanks (10 yards) of Needloft nylon (plastic canvas) yarn wherever I can find it. Bungee cords for rubber legs. I guess I could go on and on if I could recall all of the same materials I use for tying that I get from other sources that are cheaper :D.
I’ve picked up abandoned lobster floats on the beach and used a length of copper pipe to bunch out popper bodies.
I also made up a drying wheel for epoxy flies from a little battery (2 C batteries) operated motor thing for spinning a christmas santa decoration for about $5.00 — I’ve seen the sorta the same thing mounted on a board in some fly catalogs for $80.00 (minus the santa).
Silca packets that come in with electronics were suggested on another thread for dropping in fly boxes to absorb moisture which sounds like a good idea.
More random musings: Plastic wrap for midge wings, tin foil under epoxy, hackle guards made from the lid of a coffee cup, deerhair packing tools made from bic pens with the cartridege removed, jar lids for mixing up epoxy, metal form the top of wine bottles to shape zonker bodies, plastic bag from grocery store with one handle over the vise to collect loose bits.
Biggest savings though for me has been tying up comparaduns and saving on hackle.
Rubber bands for tail or leg material.
Pipe cleaners for weighted body material.
Foil potato chip bags in various colors can be used to glue to the foam for crease flies.
Pen bodies for a half hitch tool.
Packing foam to cut out popper bodies.
Costume bead necklaces to cut and use for eyes.
I like the DMC embroidery threads that can be found at department and craft and fabric stores. Many colors are available (more at craft and fabric stores than Wally’s) and the stuff is cheap at ~30 cents per small skein.
Also if you have cats or rabbits they’ll be providing dubbing about now. I love my wife’s calico cat because it provides several very nice colors of fine dubbing.
Heavy fishing line makes an marginally acceptable substitute for V-rib or D-rib material. Better yet, the craft stores carry a stretchy material that serves the same purpose for use in stringing beads.
The woven handles that come from decorative bags that people now use for gifts can be unraveled for some interesting dubbing and depending on how it unravels, makes a useful and simple material for tying sucker spawn. I’ve manage to collect orange, white, gray, pale green and canvas colors so far.
Throw rugs that have unraveling strands or carpet scraps can provide some useful material for dubbing/wrapping/wingposts/shucks etc.
My tying materials box is a real hodge-podge of stuff includng a few things that were actually intended (sold) for fly tying.
I found swannundaze/nymph rib etc. look-alikes at Jo-anne in a big bag. 3 styles…black/gray/white and bright colors and pastels. about 1.99 per bag, for a ton…now to figure out what to do with the blues and purples.
Hobby Lobby or Michaels: Wire, Beads (metal and glass), rabbitt skins, guinea feathers, duck feathers, big hackle in many colors, goose biots in a lot of colors, partridge feathers, foam, yarn, chenile, flahabou, silly skin, head cement, peacock and ostrich herl, and many many other posibblites. $20 and an hour or so will give you a big bag of materials.
Many times, however, fly shops have stuff in the ‘correct size’ and that makes all the difference. But I won’t buy stuff that is overpriced to ‘be fancy’.
Also. Many times I will buy a fly to see how it is made. They make great ‘templates’.
