I’ve always called it by what it’s good at doing, combining all manner of leftovers into a “chaos wrap”, which tames a gaggle of unruly and dissimilar materials into something cohesive on your hook shank. As well as melding unrelated objects it can right-size materials that are too long, and add some thread spine into [...]

The physics of it all dictate lighter and smaller, the biology suggests buggier, and all the painstaking research says we’ve only scratched the surface of their depravity, as their tastes might range from drab to the ridiculously bright. Physics because there’s a lot less water and rather than flinging high atomic weight, I may drag [...]

Flat tinsel is one of the many thousands of fly tying tasks that are intuitive in concept and unduly difficult in practice. Tinsel in past decades was flat metal, which sliced through fingertips with only slightly more resistance than tying thread. The switch to Mylar eased the bloodletting and ended tarnish, but had the same [...]

I’ve always assumed that questions about the mechanics of dubbing stem from the preponderance of fly tiers that attempt to learn the craft from books, Youtube, or blog posts like this one. Most of us contract the fly fishing bug from someone else, and while casting and simple tasks like knots are shared from one [...]

One of the horrors of being thoroughly enamored of a hobby is the fits of giddy that result when something attempted actually lives up to the original idea, versus flaming out midway through the development process. My ambition was to develop a dubbing that mimicked the superfine aquatic mammal fur we’ve reserved for dry flies, yet was cheap [...]

Tying these fuzzballs reminded me of all the notes on competition hooks and their efficacy I’ve been scribbling over the last couple of seasons. I find myself having so many defective hooks of late, and at thirty-five cents a hook I keep trying to make up for poor quality control and fix them with tying [...]

Bobbing away in some nameless lake last summer, I’d attributed my lack of success to a poorly designed floating midge imitation, and if I combined the air intake of an F-18E Super Hornet with a bit of deer hair, I could  produce a better imitation that could showcase the body color to best advantage. … [...]

When tying on hackle tip wings you can save yourself grief if you take the time to prune the duff that is part of the tie-in area created when the tips were mounted. Most tiers simply leave the fibers trapped by the thread, lifting and pushing them back towards the wing when the hackle is [...]

“Feelers” and Latin have gone hand in hand with one another for the last half century. Each time we get enamored over insect science via the teachings of some new prophet, we tiers feel compelled to add them to everything that floats, sinks, or simply drifts fetchingly between the two … … and us fishermen [...]

Whether you’re following the teachings of some past master or merely becoming enamored of steelhead fishing, at some point you’ll enter a tangled web of materials poorly suited to fly tying – all of which will be proof against brute force or coaxing … Most Atlantic Salmon tiers will admit to being frustrated by many aspects [...]