Fly Tying: Spring’s Eternal Fiddling

All the fiddling and sorting of fly boxes. Regrouping and culling out the uglies. Pretty little rows of possibilities. How many fly boxes must a grown fly fisher have? If there such a thing as hoarding of fly boxes? I suspect there is for fly tying materials.

I have little left to tie. Some more wets, some little patterns with tufts of CDC, some Ants, some Damsels. I think I have tied about all I really need for the coming seasons. But, I have been feeling pretty energized tying of late and it has relieved a bit of the pent up life forces that have accumulated. So, I may continue to experiment and dabble for no charted purpose beyond the pleasure of creating and imagining the presentation and take. 

Fly Tying Materials: The Hoarding Gene?

I recently remarked over on the blog, Hoarding Woes, that some people involved in craft activities can display hoarding tendencies. I pulled out all my fly boxes, to display, as a hint of what enormous quantities of materials I have in so many containers that I make amazing discoveries all the time …”Oh, I forgot I even had that, those, these, them …”  

So, when my good friend Jim called to say, “I am cleaning out my barn and I have all these materials from Ralph (good friend, avid fly fisher that died 15 years ago) that I want to get rid of…” I said, without hesitation, ‘Sure, I’ll take it’. It was described as “some animal pelts, capes, yarns and a whole bunch of stuff.” 

My son was kind enough to go load it up while I was out of town. I came home to my garden shed loaded up. And, a tipping point has been reached: I really have no decent place to put it all. I am full up now. What was I thinking? And, so it goes….. I have a new boat load of 1970’s fly tying materials with some animal pelts that Ralph harvested somewhere over out of Prineville. The good thing is I feel a bit uneasy about this acquisition so maybe I am not quite so much a hoarder?