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.
