The sight of a box of Maple Sugar Tintex isn’t likely to raise your blood pressure nor cause your heart to flutter, but my recent encounter was cause for an unsightly display of my version of Snoopy’s Happy dance …

Maple Sugar is a color that is no longer made by the Canadian dye maker, Tintex, and is the original color for the dyed Teal Flank that Cal Bird used for the Bird’s Nest. Maple Sugar Tintex, is also an outstanding source of imitation Wood Duck when dyeing Mallard flank as its replacement. Tintex stopped making the color nearly forty years ago without giving us fly tiers a chance to lay in a goodly supply.

After several decades of fruitless searching, garage sales, and similar venues, I’d not been able to turn up some old stock from any source.

Tintex and RIT were both consumer oriented dyes, fixed with salt, that were intended for home use, on curtains, garments, and hosiery. From the 1940’s onward, both RIT and Tintex were available on every store shelf, in every variety store, and nearly all the “Mom and Pop” neighborhood stores. Old school fly tiers, who dyed their own colors to suit local insects requiring custom colors, used both as the “go to” agent for creating materials not readily available.

Both RIT and Tintex have their fixative agent, salt, mixed into the dye powder to make the dye process foolproof. Protein dyes, more commonly used with feathers and fly tying materials, use acid as the fixative, and it is NOT premixed into the dye. Jacquard and similar companies require you to add acid, typically a 5% Acetic (White Vinegar) or 10 % Muriatic (swimming pool acid), into the dye bath to make the color permanent.

Tintex dyes are still made in Canada but many colors have changed and they are no longer in most American stores. RIT won the domestic battle, but even they are only present in a third of their former locations.

Pure stubborn mixed with an elephantine memory allowed me to stumble onto a stash of old Tintex dyes, and it was akin to Harrison Ford glimpsing the Arc of the Covenant … there, gleaming in their aging plasticine wrappers,were five boxes of Maple Sugar, which would be enough to equip a regiment of anglers with teal feathers.

Both RIT and Tintex prepacked boxes dye about a pound of material. More if you will settle for a lighter shade of the color, less if you need it darker. Five boxes means I can dye about two and half kilos of teal flank, which is enough Teal flank to depopulate the Pacific Flyway …

Fishermen are a superstitous lot, with as many metaphysical hangups and superstitions as baseball players and gamblers. NOT owning any teal flank dyed in the original color will NOT make your flies less fearsome, but as success in fly fishing is always due to the angler’s confidence in his fly, your ersatz offering might interest minnows and frogs, while mine …

… … well, I might be going home with the Prom Queen … as it’s my lucky day ..