How to get motivated to tie flies in the grip of winter.
Wanna start stacking em up. You’ve gotta find your groove first.
There are times when I know I need to get at the vice but I struggle for the motivation. I am gonna share a few tips on how I can get myself stoked to tie.
Clean up and organize your materials. Yeah yeah everyone hates to do this but it really does work. Wanna get the itch to get at it?? Go organize your stuff. You’ll find inspiration coming from all sorts of areas. You’ll maybe find those 3 new unopened colours of Schlappen that you bought 2 years ago (with all the best intentions) and it will get you back on the track. Organizing my tying gear fires me up to get at the vice, it gets me thinking about tying and it allows me to do an inventory of the things that I need or have too much of. Try to purge some of the stuff that you aren’t gonna use. The mass accumulation of unused stuff just makes the task of cleaning and organizing that much more daunting when the day comes to do it.
Don’t know what to tie? get the ball rolling by cleaning and sorting your Marabou. This is often all it takes to help me keep moving forward.
Clean, sort or grade materials. I wrote a blog post a while back about cleaning marabou. This is a great way to get your brain in gear.
This day I didn’t know what to tie but I knew I’d need lots of eyes and junction attached so I did that. By the time I was finished prepping 300 of these I was dying to put fur and feather on em.
Clean and organize your fly boxes. Similar to above it gives you a chance to do a bit of a visual inventory of what you have and what you need. again like in materials, do a purge. There’s someone out there who needs or would love to have all your fly rejects.
This Box is my Fly museum (before). its a mixture of memories, samples and flies that people have given me.
Fly museum (after) there a lot of inspiration in this box. Thats why I kept them isn’t it?
Visit a fly shop and look through the bins. Buy some samples of bugs you like and take em home and re-create them. Ask if there are any new and exciting materials that have come out. There’s some great new stuff every year now.
Watch some videos. You likely got a few old DVDs so dust em off and watch them again. There’s a million tying vids on YouTube. This can work well to get you back at the vice during a winter cold snap.
This fly was a result of a prototype session. The session was inspired by finding a fly someone gave me in a big muck out of a fly box .
Go back through your Books- That’s why you bought em right?? I’ve got a little bit of a love/hate with all books right now. I love to read but I hate the bulk of books (likely due to my nomadic lifestyle)
I’d be surprised if none of these techniques work to help you get back on the vice if they don’t maybe go shine your golf clubs and spend more time at that next summer.