Oops, I forgot to add Sugar-free Kool- Aid mix for dying, and a 100-pack of cotton balls to go with it for practically any color of dubbing you could ever want. Nail Polish and acetone for head cement (Note that it is acetone, not the nail- polish remover with moisturizer - trust me! The moisturizer precipitates out, minimally, but if there is an abundance of precipitate around, your cement is opaque/ speckled a rust- brown and white...) What else... The cellophane wrapping around a box of cigarettes is great for wings; cigars are wrapped in a heavier thickness of material, great for a wrapped body on nymphs. Paint-brush bristles and/ or bristles from an old toothbrush or hairbrush make great legs. Used up / shredded tippet fragments may be melted down to use as eyes on flies... I think that is a good start for the list - I'm interested to see other ideas I may or may not have thought of.
Pete
On 11/14/06, Peter Gramp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Plastic ties. The kind where one end slips inside the other and locks. Pieces
from the smallest ones make great beetle legs.
I'm just curious, as I'm finishing up tying a realistic Brochymena sulcata (aka 'stink bug') and am looking for the 'right' leg material: Can you describe the ties a tad more? I envision three distinct ties, the "twist tie" (paper-coated wire), the 'trash-bag Christmas-tree" type (a piece of plastic that has a series of cuts in arrow-head shapes that looks like a demented Christmas tree), and the 'cable tie' (it looks like a miniaturized grate of some kind, with an O on one end for the grate to pass through)... sorry to belabor the topic, but I'm just curious, is all. If it is the cable tie, as I suppose, how do you prepare it to get the legs? I can't wrap my head around it...
Thanks in advance,
Pete
