Viking Lars | Saturday, 5 February 2022
When tying flies left over materials are an inevitability, but there are steps you can take to reduce the amount of materials you throw out. Not all left overs make sense to keep and not everything makes sense to use. But some do and in my experience, making sense of left overs is simply a matter of getting into the habit of 1 - keeping them and 2 - creating some sort of organisation in order to quickly and easily store them in a meaningful way.
When you’re using genetic hackles for dry flies, one hackle will almost always tie more than one fly, whether it’s from a cape or a saddle. A premium dry fly saddle hackle will of course tie maybe 10 or 15 dries, depending on quality. A quality hackle from a neck or a cape can often tie 2-3 flies, the last maybe being a size smaller than the two first. That’s one good reason to keep them. I simply have zip lock bags with the (estimated) hook size for left over hackles.
As the last few FPs have reflected, I’ve been tying pike flies and they consume materials. And the more materials are used, the more left over is created, so here’s an example of how I keep and use some of the left overs. I like to use saddle hackles for sides on some pike flies and saddle hackles are long. So even though the pike flies are big, there’s usually quite a lot of hackle left, very well suited for medium sized palmer flies. I never use high quality saddles for pike flies, so the left overs aren’t suited for dries, but perfect for wets. Both flies are tied with a tail of the very lower, fluffy parts of the hackle and the rest of the hackle is used for 2-3 turns as a front hackle continuing straight into 3-4 turns of palmer hackle.
As the last few Fps also have reflected, I’ve been experimenting with dubbing brushes and a material I really like using in them in Craft Fur. I want the longer stuff in the dubbing brushes, so all the “underfur” is sorted out, but I keep it, because it makes excellent dubbing.
In the PoD are also a few thin, high quality saddles I’ve used for a few flat wing sand eels, and the bottom half of these high quality saddles are very well suited for small dries, so they go in to the #16-18 saddle hackle zip lock bag.
Small off-cuts from zonker strips are excellent when you need a little fur in a dubbing loop or for a tail. Even hackle tips kan be kept for tails and wings, but keep it sensible.
I make an effort to keep everything that makes sense and I have tied hundreds of flies with materials that many others would have thrown out.
Have a great weekend,
Lars