Dazzle-Aire synthetic yarn?

[oldschool 0]

From the book Polly Rosborough, "Tying the soft hackled Nymph" ? He mentions his favorite synthetic yarn - Dazzle-Aire as being available at any Kmart or Department store. Anyone familar with this brand, I'd like to find it or something similar? If its no longer around - what does everyone else use for tying?

 

 

jman

[phg 0]

Dazzle_Aire was a brand of 100% acrylic yarn that used to be marketed by Caron. It was a 4-ply worsted. I would imagine any other brand of acrylic worsted would work as well. You might look in craft stores at the latch hook yarns.

[Hot Tuna 0]

Dazzle Aire is trilobal antron yarn...it is the preferred yarn to use sparkle caddis patterns a'la Gary LaFontaine....and no, any other acrylic will not do.

Hot Tuna

[phg 0]

I had forgotten about the tri-lobal facet. That was why it had a bit of sparkled to it. You can still find it on eBay, but I suspect you might have trouble finding specific colors. :dunno:

[Hot Tuna 0]

Not too long ago I found a site that had original sparkle yarn...I believe it was run by Heather LaFontaine-Ellison, Gary's daughter. I couldn't find it in my bookmarks. Al and Gretchen Beatty were good friends with Gary; I bet they know how to get the real sparkle yarn. I still have a stash from a while back.

Good luck on your yarn quest.

[flytire 0]

lots of it on ebay!

 

http://search.ebay.com/Caron-DazzleAire-Be...-aire_W0QQfsiZ1

[nemoblackdog 0]

Antron / Dazzleaire is in no way unique to having tri-lobal fibers. This is nearly standard technology in many sorts of textile fibers, and certainly those used for making most carpets. Antron was an early brand of this sort of fiber for carpeting, but now trilobal (and other multilobal cross sections) are probably more common than not.

 

One advantage of multi-lobal fibers is that the light reflectivity helps it to hide soiling. This is an advantage you'd expect that most carpet manufacturers would want to provide.

 

That said, there's probably a host of other factors besides cross-section that may make one fiber "better" than another for your fly-tying needs - fine vs. coarse, polyester, acrylic, nylon, polypropylene, etc...

 

 

[Gnatman 0]

You can still get the real McCoy from "The Book Mailer", which was Gary's site.

 

It can be found here: http://www.thebookmailer.com/Supplies/SparkleYarn.html

 

 

 

Gnatman

[Hot Tuna 0]

....that's the site I was looking for! Thanks Gnatman.

[oldschool 0]

Hey you guys are great, I can order from the book mailer. Will do that but I wonder if theres another product in a craft store? Surely theres more than one way to buy this yarn? I'll keep checking and report back.

 

Heres what I am looking for :bugeyes:

From The Book Mailer

"It is a miracle material -- just look in any fly tying catalog and you’ll see how it has been embraced since it was first used on the Sparkle Pupa in 1972. But there are many different types of Antron, and only one type is correct for LaFontaine patterns. It's getting harder and harder to find the brand name knitting yarns that have Antron; and it's impossible to get all of the good colors. To ensure that we'll always have the right type of Antron available for our customers, and for our own flies, we contracted for production runs of custom colors of the perfect yarn."

 

 

jman