Bubba Stewart
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2012 7:05 pm
I was playing around with the dyed Starling skin I got from Aaron Ostoj today (in this case, the UV orange.)
As y'all know, I'm not the prisoner to tradition
so one of the things I was playing around with was keeping my Sheer 14/0 as my working thread, but using a length of Pearsall's Marabou floss as the armature for the rest of the fly. If you worked with Marabou before, you'll remember that Pearsall's naturally falls into separate plies--I took two fine strands, tied them onto the shank, then tied a knot at their ends to form a loop that I then loaded with dubbing and took toward the eye, stopping where the "Stewart" part of the spider would begin. After securing the loop with a wrap of my Sheer working thread, I tied in the Starling amidships, then took the Sheer to the hook-eye. At that point, I reloaded my floss loop with dubbing, then used a pair of EZ-pliers to grasp both the shaft of the feather and the dubbing brush. At that point, it was a matter of "spinning" feather and brush together, then wrapping the hackle up toward the eye.
Again, not being one to stand on ceremony, I tried using a grouse feather as a "face" hackle on this one:
It sounds a bit fiddley perhaps, but I found that wrapping the Starling around the floss instead of the working thread led to (relatively) less cussing on my part.
As y'all know, I'm not the prisoner to tradition
so one of the things I was playing around with was keeping my Sheer 14/0 as my working thread, but using a length of Pearsall's Marabou floss as the armature for the rest of the fly. If you worked with Marabou before, you'll remember that Pearsall's naturally falls into separate plies--I took two fine strands, tied them onto the shank, then tied a knot at their ends to form a loop that I then loaded with dubbing and took toward the eye, stopping where the "Stewart" part of the spider would begin. After securing the loop with a wrap of my Sheer working thread, I tied in the Starling amidships, then took the Sheer to the hook-eye. At that point, I reloaded my floss loop with dubbing, then used a pair of EZ-pliers to grasp both the shaft of the feather and the dubbing brush. At that point, it was a matter of "spinning" feather and brush together, then wrapping the hackle up toward the eye.Again, not being one to stand on ceremony, I tried using a grouse feather as a "face" hackle on this one:
It sounds a bit fiddley perhaps, but I found that wrapping the Starling around the floss instead of the working thread led to (relatively) less cussing on my part.
