The strung saddle streamer patterns.

A pair of clown shoes.

Mr.Badger

   Here are some of the strung saddle hackle streamer patterns that I tied back when I was just starting to learn about fly tying. I call one of them the Clown shoes and the other Mr.Badger. The original idea came from an article inside the 2009 autumn issue of Fly Tyer magazines by Ward Bean called the Beaner's Baitfish. The Beaner's baitfish patterns uses soft hen hackle & marabou, although my version looks very similar, it's made with regular strung saddle hackle. There are a few reasons why I choose strung saddle hackle instead of hen hackle, first it's readily available at any fly shops with a wide range of colour selections and a regular package of strung saddle hackle cost only about $2 to $3 dollars Cdn, but the main reason is because it's the only materials that I've got a lot of at the time. I was really happy with the final result of the finished fly. The red & yellow clown colour turn out to look pretty good as a streamer pattern. This kind of fly pattern is excellent for beginners, because it's simple and it's a good way to practise one of the basic, but very useful skill in fly tying, which is the palmering of hackles and the most important thing is to get the hands use to the idea of handling soft & fragile materials. The other technique that I learnt to use on this pattern is call a dubbing loop, it's where I put cross cut rabbit hair in between a thread loop & begin to twist the loop in a single direction with a tool that was made for spinning the dubbing loop, turning the zonker strips into a very soft rabbit hair hackle and a lot of other materials can be use in a similar way, like deer hair, cdc, marabou, mallard and etc. This is where the experimenting of different materials and the fly tiers own creativeness & personal preferences comes into play. This is why fly tying is consider to be an art by so many fly tiers & fly anglers.! I will list the materials for this fly pattern below for anyone who would like to try it out.***  

The baby green sea perch.

      

   Materials list.

• Hook- streamer or aberdeen size 4 to 10
• Body- strung saddle sub zonker strips, hen hackle, mallard
• Tail- strung saddle sub mallard, hen hackle, 
• Eyes- dumbbell, chain bead 
• Flash- pearl, silver, gold (optional)
• Weight- lead wire (optional)
• Thread- uni 6/0 black or match fly colour 

The clown shoes