My yarn fetish hasn’t slowed any I’ve just become demure and sensitive to catcalls from the fellows keeping a manly distance from the yarn aisle and fidgeting under the weight of Madam’s purse. My progress through the store monitored closely by a stern female proprietor who always assumes I’m shoplifting.
Can’t blame her much, she’s never seen a fellow fondle a blend of silk, mohair and polyamide with such sexual tension…
I do my best to set them at ease, shifting the subject quickly to how I plan on dismembering some hand dyed woven masterpiece into lint – and all the fish I’m liable to catch in the doing …
… which is why Grandma presses her phone number into my armload of gaily colored skeins – testosterone is in damned short supply and even a portly scowling fisherman makes for a stirring presentation.
Most of the latest batches have found their way to the reject pile. Lured by color and texture and undone by a hidden weave or indestructible fiber that prevents reduction into fur.
I’m still searching for a heavy fibrous yarn that I can get in 20-30 colors that can be torn apart for large trout flies and Steelhead.
… and at the same time I’m practicing with fiber reactive and disperse dyes – so that once I find it I can turn it into any color missing from the vendor’s base compliment.
Which usually means Olive, as it’s quite a rarity to see anything other than a Kelly Green or perhaps an Ocher.
I’ve got a lot of testing underway and damn few fish to assist. The above is a swimming-style damselfly made of a polyamide eyelash yarn which also contains a sponge segment that I’m attempting to incorporate.
You saw something similar on the mayfly nymphs I’d done earlier, only this time I’m opting to get more of those soft swimming fibers onto the fly to offer a marabou-style swimming motion.
I’m tying them on Knapek and Skalka hooks, part of a larger test of all the high priced competition wire that is becoming commonplace. I’ve laid in supplies of Knapek, Grip, Skalka, and Dohiku dry and nymph hooks to test quality of manufacture, consistency, fishing capabilities, and wire (soft or brittle) – as part of a larger article on the subject.
… in the meantime I’m proving myself a poster child for the Fish Can’t Read article on obsessive fly mongering.
Tags: Knapek, Skalka, Grip, Dohiku, competition hooks, obsessive feather collecting, polyamide yarn, Fishcantread.com, Olive is no longer fashionable, fly tying
Speaking of yarn, while traipsing down the aisles have you run into new age chenille? It’s the chenille with multi colored metalic highlights that hit the shops a number of years ago. I keep looking for something like it in the world’s e-bazaar but can’t find anything like it.
John – do you have any information to go on? Brand, or the name used on the fly shop packaging?
I encounter a lot of oddities, but the above description could describe everything from Cactus chenille to Fritz.
Is it mostly metallic – or is the metallic component in the minority?
this year i used collars tied with large dyed grizzly hackles to get the colors i wanted.
when the flies were wet the sparsely tied feathers laid back over the main body..ie. brown or orange over a green yarn gave a pretty decent olive…with a “hot spot” at the tail.
we’ll have to see if it works again next season or was just an abberation.
The market name for the chenille I mention is new age chenille. You can find it in most of the catalogs of West Coast providers. It looks to be a variegated chenille with tinsel, not pearl, included in the fibers. The tinsel is often multi-colored.
I’d never seen it before, it looks really good – I’ll dig and see what I come up with.