Tying tips: bulky brushes

You will often find that the brush on your superglue, UV glue, or Sally Hansen’s nail varnish, is just too bulky for the fine work you do. Simply use a small pair of scissors to trim away the brush fibers, leaving a much more manageable brush size. I find I trim away three quarters of them!

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The honey troglodyte

  I have been tying along a particular theme recently, that being nymphs with a V-Rib body and a tungsten bead. On this one I was focusing on getting a glowing translucence in the body: Place a 2.5mm black tungsten bead on a #14 or #16 nymph hook. Tie in a rough base (for grip) of bright yellow silk (70 denier used here) Tie in a tail of natural blonde squirrel tail, and use the tag end to build up the thorax a little , so securing the bead. Tie in a small bunch of cock pheasant tail fibres as

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Knotted legs

In a previous posting I showed a fly pattern that uses knotted pheasant tail legs, and I promised a posting to help readers tie these. Tying knots in short pieces of feather fibre is difficult, so don’t beat yourself up if you end up with bits of knotless feather on the floor, and a foul temper. That would be entirely normal, and part of the process. In fact, if I haven’t tied these in a while, I forget all my own learning and do the same for a good 20 minutes before the synapses fire, and I remember this method:

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Furled leaders

Just this last autumn, we were on a stretch of the Bokspruit river on a windy day, and PD was as usual ,using a furled leader. While he was catching fish, he was having one of those days, where he was battling to turn the fly over neatly at times, and he decided on a leader change, as part of a process of elimination. That is a sensible thing to do when you are having a “tangle-day”. You have tangled days too? Good: you are human like me. Anyway, he changed to a tapered mono leader. Within half an hour

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The Haberdashery Caddis

I strolled into a haberdashery yesterday while my son had his hair cut. The woman behind the counter viewed me with suspicion over the top of her bifocals. I was an uncommon sight for her I suppose. She seemed happy enough when I bought a few things however. One of those things was a small reel of glistening green material, with no name on it. While she was ringing it up I converted it into a Caddis pupa in my minds eye. After dinner I converted it into a Caddis pupa in my vice.

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