Tying off spiders

[flyfishwithme]

I wonder if anyone has looked hard at the old patterns and then interpreted the design given in the various books of the early 19th century.
For example. If you read some of them you will notice that they mention "a head of {coloured thread}. Viz from Sylvester Listers list:
Red Spinner - Feather from under starling wing, very light. Head, Orange silk ribbed with gold wire. Hook 14.
From this I gather he meant that the head was pronounced. Similar to this old fly I posted some time ago:

What I have been doing, and I suspect most of us, is trying the keep the head 'tie-off' as small as possible. In my case no more than three wraps. Yet it would suggest the head is an important part of the overall fly design.
Any one have had the same thoughts?

[Roadkill]

In some cases I think there are some practical fishing aspects to a large head.

Go back to the June 2, 2009 topic posted by Hans "Let us talk about heads some..."

[Old Hat]

I think it depends on the insect your trying to emulate. Here...stoneflies, march browns, drakes, some caddis have either large heads or prominent colored heads, so it would make sense to imitate that especially if you think the feature is a trigger.

[redietz]

There's another option.

1) Tie the head first. If it's a thread head, just make a false head. If it's a herl head tie in, wrap and move the thread back.

2) Tie in the feather.

3) Take the thread back to form the body and bring it forward.

4) Wrap the hackle and tie off behind the hackle:

lt-spanish-needle2.jpg

The above was a reject from a batch of Light Spanish Needles that I tied for one of the IBF swaps. As tied more of them, I realized that if I stopped winding forward about mid-point on the body, the knot would form the forward part of the body and not be so bulky.

I believe that this was how some of the flies shown in Pritt were tied, but I have nothing to back that up.

(BTW, the Light Spanish Needle has been very good to me right about this time of the year -- I took several on it last weekend.)

[Hans Weilenmann]

Philip,

Might it not be that where on eyed hooks one can imagine the eye of the hook to suggest the insect's head, whereas with snelled hooks the tier has to put in extra effort to bulk the head up some?

Cheers,
Hans W

[Soft-hackle]

Hans,\I was thinking the very same thing. I was also thinking the extra head helped hold down the snell to the hook shank much better.

Mark

[redietz]

Hans,\I was thinking the very same thing. I was also thinking the extra head helped hold down the snell to the hook shank much better.

The counter argument to this is that in Pritt, only some of the flies specify a head. The specified head is in many cases the tying silk and the same as the body.

For example:

#2 Little Black
WINGS - Hackled with a feather from a Black Cock's hackle or Starling's neck
BODY- Purple silk, dubbed sparingly with Magpie Herl
HEAD - Purple

compare that with:

#4 Little Winter Brown or Light Woodcock
WINGS - Hackled with a feather from the outside of a woodcock's wing
BODY - Orange silk with a spare dubbing of Hare's ear

with no head mentioned.

I read this as "make the head prominent on the Little Black, but keep it small on the Little Winter Brown". (I picked these two as an example because they both had dubbed bodies and no herl at the head. I was going to compare with the Dark Snipe [aka Snipe and Purple] , but since the Little Black is dubbed, he may have been emphasizing the lack of dubbing in the head.)

It is, however, the fact that they had to attach a snell in the first place that leads me to believe that the head was tied first.

[flyfishwithme]

Philip,

Might it not be that where on eyed hooks one can imagine the eye of the hook to suggest the insect's head, whereas with snelled hooks the tier has to put in extra effort to bulk the head up some?

Cheers,
Hans W

I agree Hans, but in some of the old patterns there is a definite statement about making the head {colour}. I just wonder sometimes if we are being too minimalist.