Ms Brenda Ties a Fly

Theodore Gordon is dead to begin with. 

But before that he was born in Pittsburgh in 1854 and 'fathered a dry-fly tying movement'.  

And today I was swept up in the movement.
This, then, is the beginning.
For Christmas my nephews gave me some fly tying supplies and a book with pictures.  For my birthday, the STP gave me a vise and assorted other fly tying equipment.  And today, I tied my very first fly.  Following the pattern in Chapter 2 of Tying Dry Flies. (about as closely as I ever follow a recipe) 
Step 1.  Stripped quill of peacock herl.  This is the equivalent step to preheat the oven and grease the bottom of your pan.  This is what the directions actually say:

1.  Prepare a peacock quill for the body by removing the herl with a pencil eraser.  Let the quills soak in water ahead of time to increase their flexibility.  To save time, prepare the quills in batches when tying several flies.

Which left me with several questions.  Should I soak before I erase or after?  How much ahead of time?  How many peacock quills are in a typical 'batch'?  And what exactly is herl?  At this point I should warn you that the pattern had 40 steps.  And I had 20 questions about each step. 

First I had to thread the bobbin.  The intructions said to place the thread in the tube and suck the the thread down and out through the tube.  Did they mean literally 'suck'?  Fortunately, my tool kit came with a bobbin threader.  I love the STP.

I also had to substitute some materials.  Partly because words like spade hackle and hackle butt and dun mean nothing to me and partly because I didn't really have everything the recipe called for.  (There is variation that calls for stripped peacock quill counter-wound with white thread and varnished.)

At this point I am wondering if the fish really knows the difference. 

As you can plainly see, this is what I used in place of wood-duck flank feathers.  Attached securely in my wing clump.

Next I separated the the wing clump using my bodkin.  (Which is quite different from my bobkin.) Once I posted both wings, I stopped to take another picture. That's just how properly divided my wing clump was. 

And, if I were a fish, I would have eaten the thing right then. 

The tailing fibers were supposed to be from a spade hackle(?) which near as I could tell I didn't have.  I tried to use some feathers that looked similar, but they were too short.  So I added some of my nephew Jake's red hair.  I love Jake's hair, but it seemed a little fine and limp for tail fibers.  Nothing a little hair gel can't fix.  After I had it on my fly, I gave it a little trim.  Besides, as chapter 2 describes the properly tied fly, it will balance so that the

fly rides over ...water like a Coast Guard lifeboat, so nearly balanced that often the tail...doesn't touch the water at all. 

Just 15 more steps and I had my peacock quill wrapped.  This seemed like a lot of fuss about nothing ,as a peacock quill with its herl erased looks a whole lot like black thread to me.  Evidently fish have a more discriminating eye for these things. 

And then I wrapped the hackle.  (Hackle seems to be a fly tying jargon which is used whenever you don't know what else to call something.)   There must be a method to do this.  I tried using my hackle pliers (I'm not making this up), but without much success.  Luckily I had a an extra hackle.

Here is a picture that is not in the book.  It comes between step 38 and step 39. It is my finger firmly half hitched to the fly.

And here is my finished Quill Gordon.  I set it next to the picture in the book and, really, I think it is amazing.  (Mine is the one on the right.)

Join us next time, when we skip ahead to chapter 6--The Sparkle Dun.