This evening a few friends and I sat around a makeshift workbench involved in great productivity. I was making feather jewelry, and the other two were drafting. My friend reminisced about the Fly Tying classes his mother used to enroll him in. He grew up on a famous fly fishing river in Cape Breton and said that some flies can sell for over $50 – If they catch fish – and the most beautiful ones always end up in frames.
The topic sparked the memory of how, when I was a child, my great uncle sent me 3 flies in the mail. I cannot remember the significance of them or the context of why they were sent to me. I did not know how to fly fish and never took up the sport. However, I put them in my jewelry box and there they still sit. I come across them every couple of years and study them. I think of them fondly sitting there in my jewelry box but never have I taken them out of their protective packaging or used them for fly-fishing.
Then I recalled the Fly Tying vice my father gave to me a few years ago. It consisted of a couple of movable magnifying glasses on a cast iron base with two heavy-duty tongs. Still when I received this gift I did not jump into the sport of tying flies. I once used it to look at the symmetrical nature of dragon fly wings but that was as close as I came to tying flies.
Now as I write this, I remember cleaning the cottage of a man who had dedicated an entire area of his cottage to tying flies. Whenever I came to cleaning his office I was under strict instructions never to dust or vacuum the over sized pine desk. The surface was littered with minuscule, beautiful particulates.
Sometimes signs are not clear.
It was not until I found the following page, browsing the art of tying flies that I realized where I must evolve my art of working with feathers.
It is all too clear that I must become a Fly Tier…or a Tie Flyer.
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