Blending Dubbing
 

An excellent method of blending fur and similar materials in order to
obtain a fairly homogenous mixture, is to put the fur you wish to
blend in a screw top jar, half fill the jar with water or until the
fur is well covered, and shake the jar vigorously for a while. Pour
the result through a piece of ladies stocking (remove the lady
first!), or other fine mesh net, and put the resulting heap of fur on
a sheet of white paper on top of some clean newspaper to dry. If
placed directly on the newspaper, ink may bleed, or paper stick. This
method has the advantage that you are able to see the colour you get
when the dubbing is wet! When the lump is completely dry, you may
store it, and simply pull off amounts of the perfectly blended fur as
required.

Do not be tempted to assist the drying of such blended dubbing with a
hair dryer, you will merely create a "hair storm", this is like a
"sand storm", but much hairier, and sticks to everything. Tastes awful
as well, but is relatively harmless as long as you washed it
beforehand.

The resulting mess, even from a comparatively small quantity of such
dubbing, is quite indescribable, alone the abominable stink which
ensues, as the loose hair is sucked into the back of the dryer, and
burns on the heating elements, also requires somebody of far greater
erudition and eloquence than myself to describe, and the distributed
hair is well beyond the capabilities of most vacuum cleaners to remove
it, before your spouse/lady wishes to visit the bathroom. This is
especially debilitating if she has her silk knickers drying over the
bath. You would not believe how such dubbing sticks to silk knickers!
I have it on good authority that hair shirts are merely a mild joke in
comparison.

This may well jeopardise your future supply of ladies stockings, quite
apart from considerably reducing your opportunities of removing the
lady from them, or vice versa, in the near future. Old socks are not
as useful, (and removing them is also not exactly a joy). The silk
knickers are in any case useless, at least for filtering dubbing.

In the absence of a lady, I suppose you could try underpants, I have
heard that people even make coffee using them. And why not? However, I
would suggest you at least make the coffee first. Much the same
applies to the blender, if you use it to grind coffee, then don't use
it for mixing dubbing. Hairy coffee is absolutely disgusting, perhaps
not quite as bad as hairy silk knickers, but almost certainly on a par
with "Iron Blue", "Medium Olive", or "Dark Claret" chips, if you
forget to clean the chip pan after a dyeing session. Quite apart from
any hospital bills which might accrue as a result.

Dubbing is an ancient art, and there are many "secret" recipes. Mostly
I try to achieve blends of colours by adding at least three colours,
(or "shades", much natural fur has no single colour as such), and
sometimes more. There are very few insects of only a single colour,
and even fewer with bodies of bright blue or red or green. Although
there are some. Even these are rarely a single shade.

This blending technique, along with others, is quite ancient, and
still very popular for Irish flies, and some North Country flies,
although it is not much talked about nowadays. Quite recently, a lot
has been made of "New" "spectrumised" dubbing. Apart from sounding
like a load of codswallop to me, "Blended" would seem more than
adequate for describing the result of the process, it is not new at
all, but probably one of the oldest techniques in existence. Many now
ignore it, mainly for convenience sake, but they lose a lot as a
result.

As a rule, subdued blended colours are much more successful than
bright flashy ones. The most effective flies are usually those which
are tied very sparsely indeed, and where the dubbing is so sparse that
the silk or other underbody shines through underneath the dubbing. The
silk, or the underbody, must of course be of the right colour to
achieve these effects. (This does not apply to knickers, at least not
in connection with dubbing).

Mole fur or water rat dubbed on yellow silk was a favourite of some
old English wet fly experts. The "dubbing bag" of a good dresser at
the turn of the last century in England would have contained moleskin,
mouse skins of various types, rat, water vole, hedgehog, fox,
squirrel, and hare, obtained at different seasons of the year when
their coats were of the required colour. Some of these are of course
now unobtainable. Some dressers would have quite outlandish dubbing
collections, even going so far as to drag aborted calves and the like
out of lime pits. I fear I draw the line at such, and I don't know of
any lime pits in any case! Nearly as much trouble as elephants, or
poisonous cormorants, as far as I am concerned.

I do have a couple of "secret" dubbing mixes, some of which I was
given a long time ago in Yorkshire, and a couple of "modern" ones,
which actually work very well, and I will list a couple later on.

You will often hear people saying or writing that it does not make a
lot of difference, and that the "approximate" colour suffices, even in
a single colour. I can assure you that this is most decidedly not the
case. The correct mixture may often be essential to success under
particular conditions. A fly which is "near enough" may well catch a
few fish, but a fly which is "exactly right" will do much better.Not
only that, but the texture and properties of certain dubbings are
absolutely essential for correct operation of the fly. It is no good
at all using soft absorbent underfur to dub dry flies, even though
modern floatants will aid considerably in getting such things to
float. Hair used for hackles and wings, something which hardly anybody
uses, must also be bright and springy guard hair, This also depends to
a considerable extent on the size of the fly one is dressing. Using
coarse hair on small flies makes things difficult, and the flies will
not usually be much good either.

Although it is often stated that the old time dressers used mainly
natural colours, actually quite a few dyed colours were used. For
salmon and other fancy flies of course, but also for trout flies, many
of which were not at all "gaudy".

One popular method for dyeing certain feathers and furs was the use of
picric acid to obtain shades of olive which are not obtainable
naturally. Some of the dubbing mixes were passed down from generation
to generation and kept as family secrets. They were considered
essential to success. As many of these experts were subsistence
fishers, it is understandable that they did not publicise their
successful methods and flies.

Most books and articles on these matters were written by well to do
anglers, and seldom by the people who invented and used them. Picric
acid by the way is highly unstable in its dry state, tending to
explode without warning, and is also extremely poisonous. Treat
materials stained with it with great caution. It is also a powerful
contact poison. If you get yellow stains on your fingers from it, then
visit the doctor immediately! We wish to advance our knowledge of
dyeing techniques here, not dying techniques!

Is all this really necessary? Of course not, but neither is fly-
fishing itself. Collecting fur and feather, preparing, improving, and
storing it, is merely an extension of fly-dressing, which itself is
merely an extension of fly-fishing. Much of my informal "adult
education" and general knowledge, on a host of subjects, is the result
of my following up various things connected with fishing. I have read
that a "normal" man thinks about sex several times a day, well I do
that as well, but I rather fear I think even more about fishing. I say
"fishing", but of course this encompasses many fields.

Practically all the sciences, various technologies, literature,
history, the arts, etc etc etc. Indeed it is a bottomless well of
knowledge, and exploring it, indeed occasionally losing oneself in it,
is a delightful pastime. Is such knowledge useful? Well, I think so. I
believe that knowledge is intrinsically valuable. Doubtless I would
have a great deal less had I not engaged in fishing and all connected
with it at a very early age.

So, on to dyeing, dubbing, and dressing. I promised to give a few
"secret" dubbing blends, and here are a couple. The first one is a
substitute for "Chadwicks 477 wool". This was a fawn coloured darning
wool, immortalised for fly-dressers, and others, by Frank Sawyer, who
used it to dress his famous "Grayling Bug".

There has been quite a lot written and related about this stuff over
the years, and there are a fair number of substitutes extant, (the
original is now only rarely obtainable, and is very expensive), most
of which don't work very well. The most striking property of this wool
is it's apparent ability to attract fish! Indeed, fish will actually
move a good way to pick up "grayling bugs" tied with it, which are
lying static on the riverbed. They will not do this with most of the
substitutes, for the simple reason, that these are poor substitutes.

When wet, this wool takes on a peculiar glowing pinkish/purple/brown
colour, which is very attractive to fish. A Hare Fur Shrimp, is a very
good fly, and will take fish practically anywhere, but if you tie it
with the following dubbing mixture, it becomes absolutely deadly!

Just as for the original wool, the fish will actually move a long way
to pick up static examples, and fished on a rolling dead drift, close
to, or on the bottom, or even twitched and retrieved, it enjoys
phenomenal success. You can add plastic backs, and various ribbings,
and even hackles if you wish, but they don't actually make a lot of
difference. The fly is simple and very robust indeed. I have had
hundreds of fish on this simple fly. Often several dozen in a day.

Here is a pattern and the mix:

Hook, size 16 to size 6 long shank!
Underbody 1. Lead wire, Overwound with thread, and varnished.
Underbody 2. Silver lurex. Best over the "damp" varnish.
Body. Dubbing made of the following mixture.
Rib. gold (brass) wire.

Add two pinches of teal blue hare fur (or soft seals fur), one pinch
of hot orange hare fur (or soft seal fur), and one pinch of crimson
hare fur (or soft seal fur), to twenty pinches of pre-blended fawn
hare body guard fur. Blend well so that the colours "disappear" in the
general fawn colour. You can dub sparingly, keeping the fly slim, but
still covering the lurex. Or you can dub a bit more heavily, and brush
the fly to shape afterwards. The lead underbody must be varnished
(nail polish) before winding the lurex and dubbing, as it will
otherwise bleed and ruin the fly quite quickly.

This rather weird purply brown colour is very attractive to grayling,
(and trout!), and they will actually pick it up off the bottom. The
lurex is necessary to make it "shine" when wet. It will probably work
with a white painted hookshank as well, if you prefer lighter flies,
but it is most effective on the bottom. Doubtless there are other
effective mixes, but this one works well. A version with a pinch each
of bright green, bright yellow and dark red/brown dubbing added to ten
pinches of hare body fur, works very well for trout in summer, and a
version with white Anton mixed in the same hare dubbing (White, not
transparent) works well as a shrimp pattern in the ocean.

I did have a few cards of the original 477 yarn, which I bought at a
sewing shop which had old stock. I used these up long ago though, and
the dubbing mix has proved a successful substitute for the yarn.

A friend of mine gave me a card of the original stuff not too long
ago, so I still have this as a sample.

TL
MC