Alex_F

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Hi Bluesy, I used to live in Ayshire but I'm in England now. I use bees wax for my main waxing, also cobblers wax. Do a google or Ebay search for those. Cobblers wax can be bought from Bagpipe suppliers, you'll get enough to last you about 200 years for about a fiver. I only really use wax for the first few inches of silk just so it sits well on the shank and adds a bit of stick. For Bobs bits and Hoppers I use Blended seal, usually 3 colours. For black I'd use 70% black, 25% dark claret and the rest deep blood red. Rib it with clear 2lb nylon, not flourocarbon, to keep the profile down. Then attack it with velcro to get that 'halo' effect. Blended furs help with this, you get a nice very dark claret with a few red flecks. Very few insects are 100% black, brown or green in solid shades. Here's a pic I took for another forum, it might be useful to see the black, claret, red mix...

I'm into my 28th year last October. Started at the age of 10 by repairing a shop bought fly in a mini bench vice with cotton from my mums sewing basket. The fly still caught fish! So I thought 'this is easy', 28 years later and a good few hundred quid later I still love it.

Hello folks, just thought I'd drop a few lines about me in here. As you can guess, my name is Alex . I'm 37 and been tying for about 25 years so far. I'm from the midlands of England and I'm mainly a stillwater Trout fisher. My main technique is what we call traditional, or loch style fishing. It involves fishing from a drifting boat with a team of 3 flies and covering rising fish. It can be pretty exciting stuff. My main patterns are traditional wet flies. Anyway, it's nice to see a nice variety of flies pictured around the site, I'll try to post a few myself so we can compare patterns. Cheers. Alex