Cheap fly tying material

A very quick post for you fly tyers out there. It feels like everything in our lives just gets more and more expensive with every passing day so any way of reducing costs in our pastimes has to be a good thing. For fly tyers the cost of some synthetics can be quite high, so when I saw a YouTube video claiming to show ways of saving money I took a peek. There were a few tips but one in particular stood out for me, cheap flashabou.

Over the years I have collected a few hanks for various flash materials but since I don’t use very much it kinda rankles that it is so expensive. In the video the guy talks about buying 14 packets of various colours of flash for a few dollars. Each hank is enormously long as it is is being sold as hair extensions. I was sceptical, but the creator of the video was adamant the hanks were just the same as good old Flashabou and he had a life time supply for a little over a fiver. You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL265FGNuDs&t=40s

The link he posted on the YouTube video didn’t work for me but I Googled for a while and soon found the same product. Yes, 14 assorted packs worked out at about €6.50 including shipping to Ireland. I bought the packs on Sunday and they turned up on Friday. Sure enough, fourteen very long packets of flash were indeed exactly the same as Flashabou. This product is flat, not krinkled and each hank is roughly three times the length of the ones we fly tyers normally buy. You can’t specify what colours you want, they just come as a mixed bundle of packs. In my particular bundle there was :

1. A holographic magenta (could be added to a Magenta bumble or Magenta Dabbler)
2. Holographic dark green (black and green lures for early season rainbow fishing)
3. 2 packs of a rainbow sort of thing with each strand a mix of gold, blue and red. Flat, not holographic
4. A silver holographic
5. A nice sort of of golden olive holographic
6. Pearl flat (all sorts of uses, mainly added to wings and tails of white lure patterns)
7. Holographic purple (salmon flies?)
8. Dark blue holographic (I’ll add this to the tail of my favourite Bruiser Bumble)
9. A deep crimson red holographic (looks like blood, predator flies)
10. A lighter, slightly pinky red, also holographic
11. A holographic aquamarine sort of shade
12. 2 packs of a brassy gold holographic

Some of these will be only rarely used by me. Purple holographic flash is not a material I use in a whole bunch of patterns! Having said that, the cost was minimal and I will never run out of any of these colours. The golden olive will be very useful as the under wing on dabblers, the silver holo on the tails of Humungous lures and the blue is great for blue flash damsels. I can foresee lots of trials with the other colours, that aquamarine one has ‘sea trout’ written all over it for example.

Here in Ireland a packet of flash type material usually retails at around the €3.00 mark, so by my dodgy arithmetic each hank of this cheap stuff is about three times the length. 3 x 14 = 42. So, my 42 equivolent packets cost me €6.50 or roughly €0.15 cent each. Not too shabby!

If you are thinking on buying some for yourself just go on to Amazon and look for this stuff:

’14 Colors 4200 Strands Hair Tinsel Extensions, Shiny Colorful Straight Hair Extensions for Women Girls Party Cosplay Rainbow Synthetic Hair Extensions (36.6 Inches)’.

The only downside is you will have a huge amount of material so it makes sense for you and one or two mates to share the packs when you get them. I have given away some already. Now I need to find a source of cheap Bronze mallard!