I like to mess around with different “non-traditional” materials when tying flies. I picked up a couple of colors of this Shimmer Vinyl on sale at Hobby Lobby for $4.48 for each roll. The rolls are 12" wide and 48" long, so you get a TON of material. I applied this very thin vinyl to a piece of 1/8" thick craft foam to fabricate this minnow pattern. A simple pattern where I tied in the tail material, and cut the foam to size (with the vinyl already attached). and superglue the foam in place. I touched it up a bit with a marker to give it vertical bars and gills, added 3D eyes, and gave it a coat of UV epoxy. I just threw this one together to see if this stuff would hold up to the epoxy coating. For some reason, the epoxy eliminated the shimmer, but it made the vinyl into a shiny silver blue mirror which looks great. I think that this material may have lots of applications at the tying bench so I thought I’d share it here in case there are any other folks interested in messing around with this stuff.
Dang!
That looks quite interesting.
…lee s.
Very nice Jim. I like your experiments.
Dennis
jim, nice looking little pattern. should work real good on those bass that should be schooling up soon, chasing shad. think I need to stop by hobby lobby and get some foam and sheet vinyl. could be a good pattern on the white during a shad kill.
nice
along the lines of crease flies
I was planning on stopping by Hobby Lobby tomorrow to pick up some foam sheets. I’ll have to check it out. Would prefer to find some in pearl or silver, much easier to color with markers. Definite would be useful for Crease flies and some other foam patterns that I tie.
It comes in a wide variety of colors. There are two different kinds of this vinyl material. One the removable which is like the old contact paper. It sticks fine to the sheet foam, but but you have to give it a coat of epoxy for durability. The other kind is Iron On and this is very thin, almost like mylar. I bought some of that on sale as well and I had to use super glue to stick it to the foam and then caot with epoxy. I highly recommend that you get the Paper Studio removable kind as it is much easier to work with.
Jim
Hobby Lobby has such a wide variety of materials I have thought for a long time they should focus on their fly tying customers a little more. At times you can find some interesting pheasant tails, biot and ostrich plumes in the dry flower section. Also bunches of beads and colored wire to consider. No I don’t have any stock in the company.
Picked up some silver today. The removable kind. It was a $1 more in this neck of the woods. I couldn’t find any sticky back foam which is easier to deal with than applying glue to the foam. I’ll have to check out Michael’s and see if they have any. If I get a chance I’ll tie a couple of crease flies or poppers and post the pictures.
Great! I look forward to seeing them. Here’s a Crease fly I tied up just to see how the Iron-On kind works when super glued to foam. It works okay but it’s a bit of a sticky mess to position the shimmer vinyl. This color is called Motor Oil on water and has a really neat effect but you can’t see it too well in a photo. The tail is fibers from a make-up brush with some crystal flash.
Jim Smith
