Articles- Organizing Your Fly Tying Materials

PAGE 1: First, what is the most important material you use in your fly tying, the hooks, right? So, what I did to organize my hooks was to use an old nuts and bolts drawer I found in my garage. The nuts and bolts that were in there weren't getting used anyway, so I said what the heck, and cleaned out all of the drawers and used it for all my hooks. I printed out some labels for all the drawers and labeled each drawer according to size. Each drawer is labeled either a nymph hook, scud hook, or dry fly hook, and then what size hook it is. This way I can easily find which type of hook I want in addition to what size. This box has made it so much easier to find the hooks I need when I need them. One bonus is that the box doesn't take up a lot of space either.

Since the box I used for my hooks turned out so good for me, I went to my parents house and stole-borrowed, whatever you want to call it, the nuts and bolts box they had sitting in their garage. I ended up using it for all of my smaller materials such as my chenilles, stripped goose biots, scud back, vinyl rib, and more. The small drawers were the perfect size for most of my smaller materials. I again printed out some labels for each drawer. It has made a world of difference when I need those smaller sized materials for my tying.

In organizing my dubbing material I have continued to use dubbing dispensers ever since I first discovered them. They are very handy in many ways. First, the dubbing is easily dispensed through the small holes on the back, making working with dubbing a lot less messier. Don't you hate when you have fibers of dubbing all over your tying area and trying to get the dubbing out of those little plastic bags just sucks, well the dubbing dispenser allows you pick out just the right amount of dubbing each time. Second, when you run out of a certain color or texture, the dispenser allows you to basically refill it whenever you want by flipping open the backside and refilling the empty compartment. I love them. Currently I have a box for all of my hare dubbing in misc. colors, one box for fine dry fly dubbing in misc. colors, and then one box for my synthetic sparkle dubbing, mainly for my caddis flies. These assortments have been fairly adequate for my tying needs. I do have some other small containers that hold other dubbing material as well, but the dubbing dispenser has been the way to go for me.

Feathers can sometimes be a real pain to find something to store them in, especially those long saddles and capes. I have basically come up with a simple system of storing my feathers by putting them in shoebox sized Rubbermaid storage containers. I have one box for my capes, saddles, and ostrich plumes and one for my other misc. feathers. This has proved to be useful so far.

My other misc. materials such as deer hair, marabou, hares masks, etc, are also stored in its own storage container. My peacock and pheasant tails are kept upright in a pencil jar. These are materials I use often so I have chosen to leave them out in the open. This had made it very accessible when needed.