Colors are really important! More than once was I able to observe, that a change in lure/fly color had tremendous influence on bite frequency! Not only the color itself, but also the contrast that derives from the interplay of several colors can be the key to success.
If someone ties flies just for himself and as a pastime, it can quickly get expensive in the attempt to acquire a good variety of colors from each tying material.
The solution is to split a saddle or a piece of fur/bucktail into several pieces and dye them with colors that are sold to dye eggs! This applies especially to materials and colors that you do not need very often.
These “easter egg colors” come in pellets which are dissoluted in a mix of hot water and vinegar. For our dying purposes, you should replace the vinegar with lye! This lye can be easily made: Fill a coffee filter with wood ashes from the last campfire, your hearth etc. and filter your water through. The result will be a quite strong lye, which feels “soapy” when rubbed between fingers. The lye will open the fibres and let the dye protrude more easily. At the end of the process, adding a little bit of vinegar will neutralize the lye and thereby close the fibres again. This can result in a slight change of colors, most noticably in purple and blue dyes.
You can also mix colors, as e.g. I mixed orange and red to achieve bright red junglecock (see post picture). Or you can dye e.g. pink marabou in a light blue solution into a nice purple color (needed them for some GT brush flies). The general procedure is as follows:
Wait and stir slowly until the color has reached the desired shade.
