White lab coat time, as I’m fiddling with one of those materials you stumble across whose possibilities are virtually endless.

It’s a strange synthetic filament called Angelina. It is soft enough to dub like fur, and long enough to use as fine hair, it can be ironed to make bug wings (heat fuses the filaments together) or chopped up and mixed with dubbing to add an opalescent sparkle.

It is available as a fiber from the garment industry, apparently it’s also available as a cloth and as a thread.

It’s something that you can use in everything, especially during them long winter months when experimentation coupled with football and strong coffee brings your artistic side to the forefront.

It looks exactly like hair made out of mother of pearl, yet the filament size is so fine you can dub it onto a hook like fur.  It is available in about 45 colors and 2 cuts; straight, and crimped, bondable (heat fused) and non-bondable. The crimped style is slightly heavier hair than the straight version (large nymphs, steelhead flies), straight is perfect for dubbing smaller nymphs and even dry fly bodies. Every color retains the opalescent quality in addition to the coloration.

My camera cannot show the opal refractive qualities as it just isn’t good enough. I dubbed a #12 hook shank with Angelina fibers, white and pink, allowing you to see the fiber size. Click on both pictures to see a higher resolution image.

Angelina is sold in 1/2 oz. packages, a bundle of material 5″ long, 3.5″ wide, and almost 2″ thick. Cost ranges from $3.50 to $4.50 a package.

Most of the vendors pictures are as poor as mine, included are links to some sites that display a large range of colors.

This may be what they’re calling “Ice Dubbing” but not having seen that product I cannot say with certainty. If so, buying it in this flavor will be a lot cheaper than the little packages available at the fly shop.

Get the Angelina Straight Cut in whatever color you like best, it has the widest range of applications as it is the finest filament size. I purchased some sample packages (5 colors each) from Embellishment Village.