WHAT price to put a smile on the faces of the women in your life you love and care about?
I’VE got to give Chad huge kudos for his idea, gather up all the women important to us: wives, daughters, grand-daughters, friends, and each of the tyers contribute feathers from our hoarded stashes of hackle so they could share in the hair extension craze; get in a feather artist and have a party at the same time. Firstly it sounded fun right, burgers, beers, friends and family is always a good thing.
But then sitting there camera in hand watching the grins and laughter from all the girls, from Marlee at 3, to my wife Rabecca, it came to me that this is how we as fly tyers can take back the hackle craze from the fashion industry: by embracing it, by making our women happy, letting them feel special, beautiful and letting them know we care.
We fly tyers are a strange lot: stashing hunks or fur feather and tinsel in the vague hope one day it might yield the fly. The fashion for hair extensions has demolished the supply of long narrow saddle hackles and provided the mainstream media with fodder for beat-ups over fly tyers bring ticked off at hairdressers, or the outrageous prices high-grade saddle hackle is now pulling. The funny part is the high-grade saddles are probably one of the slower moving items on a fly shop shelf, and unless you are a commercial tyer, a saddle will last you years.
Probably those that are most grumpy over the fashion trend are the speculators who want to buy a $40 saddle and sell it for $600 on Ebay. And besides substitution has always been part of the art in fly tying. I always liked tying some special low riding and truly killer mayfly emergers, with scrappy old Indian necks with very sparse barb counts _ to get them to sit lower like flies used to 30 years ago. I might sound a little curmudgeonly in saying while I appreciate the beauty of the modern saddle feathers, its way too easy to over-hackle, both collar hackle dries and parachutes.
Anyway fly tying isn’t what this post was supposed to be about. Chad’s brainchild encompasses what I love about this fly shop and the people who work in it, the sense of family here, of caring for others, the sense of fun, which extends out to everyone who walks through the door. Apparently y’all appreciate it too, given some of the cool comments for the raw pics I was working on we got from the hectic run of traffic yesterday. It was a great night.
We had lined up Angela Perkins from Chasing Feathers (870 656 6733) to do the work _ apparently our rudimentary experiments with Zap-A-Gap hadn’t worked like the tricks of the pros _ and Chad, Jim Mike, Clark and myself dug into the saddles we had amassed over the years. I might be overstating it but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was $5000 at current prices laying on the floor and let the girls choose what they wanted. Heck at 6 feathers each girl, spread over all the hackles, you wouldn’t even notice the dent. But the reactions were simply priceless.
And besides, we all know that our chicken feathers haven’t suddenly turned to gold, that they will be back. The idea of thumbing our noses to the speculators, the fly by nights and others simply trying to get rich quick, by giving feathers to those we love, is pretty damn cool, you have to admit.
So our suggestion for dealing with the fashion craze: have a feather party, get out some of your best feathers, the woman or women you hold dear, and put that special smile on their faces. Every girl, no matter her age deserves to feel like a princess for a day.
You will feel a whole lot better for it.
Steve.
