we've already done "divorced, beheaded, died": so now it's time to move on to "divorced, beheaded, survived".



the anne of cleves -- "the flanders mare" -- has a big clunky "head" and big clunky "feet". beaver dubbing and silk waste dyed with cochineal make her mantle, and her skirt and "legs" are natural silk, caddis beads, and a material unceremoniously labelled "hair". (it smelled like "ass". this is a feature not uncommon to fly-tying materials, which come often in little sealed plastic bags.)



the katherine howard is based on a "nymph" pattern, meant to approximate a fly in it's not-quite-adult stage. like katherine howard, yes? and this one, with its parrot colors, is also headless. no head dangling by her side (or tucked underneath her arm, as the song about anne boleyn does go) but gone entirely.





i have a particular fondness for katherine parr because hey -- she outlived the gout-ridden bastard. and, whenever i have taken the "which wife of henry VIII are you?" quiz online, i have come out to be katherine parr. and although she was never said to be any great beauty -- and was, i believe, rather puritanical -- i tried to make the katherine parr dignified and beautiful in its own way. here it is, canoodling with the king. lucky girl.

i have a plan for displaying the six flies, but that's for another post! ta da! i did it.

please, it is august, do not pain me with the ankle-nipping, arena-rocking Magpie Squad rhetoric and ask "WHY does this woman not just knit a SWEATER?" i am knitting a sweater, so there.

but it has been too long since i practiced my fly-tying (such as it is) and i needed a motivation. tying the flies that you use to KILL FISH is unpleasant to me. there are other people around to go through all the requisite fish-killing steps. i just eat the fish. so... what flies to tie?

as most who read this page know, i like henry VIII and his wives the way some people like batman or spiderman. if i had brown bag textbook covers, i'd draw them all and write their names in a bunch of different styles. but, instead, i decided to tie flies in honor of each of the six wives. here are the first three.

the catherine of aragon

catherine was spanish and a devout catholic. rummaging through the secretary in my spinning room, it was easy to come up with something that fit on a fly that pretty closely represented both of these attributes: a little milagra charm of a praying girl. in fact, if one wishes, it is possible to view this little girl as catherine and henry's only surviving child, mary, who eventually went on to a rather wretched period on the throne herself.

catherine was married to henry for seventeen years -- she was a trouper! while no fabulous beauty, she did enjoy being queen. the neutral-colored, striped feathers and peacock-colored dubbing make her "gown" -- and she has a regal gold wire head. i am mad that the feathers got a bit "wrinkled up" when i was tying them on, but live and learn.

the anne boleyn

perhaps i am just too obvious in always wanting to put anne in red. in this case, i had some tiny red feathers from a bag full given to me by rai. real peacock hurl was used on the 'bodice'.

ah, but anne's "head". it is a bead, and it is rather... unattached. i think we all know why!!!

the jane seymour

my first instinct with jane seymour was to go girly, virginal, even angelic. clearly, that's just what i did -- maribou, sparkly little stars. you could almost sell this fly at the disney store -- except for the treacherous barbed hook, and the death's head.

you may remember the death's head fly from nearly a year ago. it was one of my first and i LOST it when we moved. then a few weeks ago, ben found it in the car! i pillaged it to use the death's head bead for jane seymour.

why a death's head for jane, and not for anne boleyn or katherine howard, whom henry had killed? because jane's death is different. jane DIED. jane was taken from the king. king henry was in loooooove with jane seymour, the people of england loooooooved jane, she was faithful, she had given the king an heir, and she DIED. that's why.

i've got ideas on the other three, but they aren't completely fleshed out yet, and i've got display ideas, too.

i have a very hard time remembering the names of yarn brands -- and even yarn types and weights. and i have a resistance to knowing them.

i do not think there is some sort of bohemian cachet in not knowing the names of yarns. i did not cultivate this trait.

remember in grade school, how sometimes, you'd just say something, and some little moronicus would go, "nuh uh" -- usually somebody you weren't even talking to? wasn't that puzzling? it was for me. it just stopped me in my tracks. it's hard when you're a kid, to keep talking under such conditions. i was saying things that were perfectly natural and honest -- which some people, of course, simply accepted -- but some people didn't believe me. my dad's a nurse, my cousins are black, my sister has steel rods running up and down her spine. nuh uh.

my life was literally incredible! i think it still may be!

i have a resistance, a completely conscious one, to the heavy branding associated with yarns and the "industry". but i like words, of course, so why do i not like to learn these words -- and why is it hard to even get them unconsciously, when there is so much other stuff i pick up without trying? i am pretty sure anyone anywhere would want me on their quizzo team, if my "jeopardy" track record is any indication. and yet, we must hope there isn't yarn "industry" quizzo or i am dead.

i am generally familiar with the yarns i have purchased because i have seen the wrappers. once in the last year or two i bought some rowan yarn called ... forgive me... either it is CALLED "big yarn" and i was calling it "big knit" or the other way around. i don't know, i don't know! but whichever it was i was wrong and the young twentysomethings at rosie's yarn cellar would snap at me with exasperation, even embarassment -- not that they do this to EVERYBODY -- a certain level of intimacy has been reached for me there i dare say -- they would snap at me the way you snap at your mom or your grandma when she keeps calling something by a slightly wrong name. "no, nana, it's not big KNIT. it's big YARN."

or the other way! whatever!

here are some words i know go with yarn but i have absolutely no idea what they are: cascade. blitz. um... shit. i knew one more that i was going to put here.

i know what koigu is and i know what noro is -- even if you took the labels off i would know! i know colinette!

we got the orvis catalog this week and it has all kinds of new patterns for flies. it's been slow going with the flies but i've been thinking about it more lately and last night bookmarked a pattern for something called a "hula shrimp". which requires a material called "flashabou". i do not have any, nor had i heard of it before, but i am sure it is some hybrid of krystal flash and marabou. there! why was THAT so easy and pleasant? are these things not the corrolaries of yarn?

(to be fair, when i started tying flies i kept insisting i needed a material called "spackle hackle". there is no such thing as spackle hackle.)

i do not know the difference between dk weight and worsted weight and sport weight and fingering weight and lace weight. but let me guess, i just accidentally listed them in perfect descending order, right?

fly patterns have fun directions like "tie in a bunch of white zonker." that's really appealing! who's gonna forget white zonker? but is there one brand that rates above the others? does it have a name? i think that's where it starts to fall apart for me.



was there a time when yarn brands, and specific lines of yarn, and even colors of yarn, had better names?

like bands used to have better names? they really did -- band names suck now, too. the full-page ads in the free weeklies, for the small clubs that feature about sixty bands a month -- crap name after crap name after crap name. well, no, "better than ezra" is still a good name. does anybody but me sit around shouting "that's from hemingway!" while drinking coffee and eating crumb cake and reading the paper in public? but "death cab for cutie"... does anybody but me sit around shouting "that's a line from a song on culture club's third album and it STILL sucks!" while drinking iced tea and eating crumb cake and looking at ben's paper?

you want better band names? here's your better bandnames. among my favorites: Dudley Piro and the Unseemly Girl Adventure. Handful of Breeders. Donna Nugent and the Fresh Consultant Orchestra. Bag of Thumbs.

(another good way to get band names is to check your blog's stats, and look at the keyword phrases.)

if there were a line of yarn called "Bag of Thumbs", i would so be breaking the self-imposed yarn moratorium. if there were a yarn company called Buckaroo Cooper and the Jerusalem Porn Stars, i would count heavily on its greatness. i am very susceptible to such charms.

i came up with two.

this is the one i call the Dame Edna. its tail is made from an acid green-dyed bucktail and pearl krystal flash -- common fly-tying materials. the body is a drop-spindle combo of silk waste dyed with cochineal, and some bamboo/silk blend that was actually put in an exhausted indigo bath -- that only served to eliminate it's natural yellowness and give it this silvery blue "invisible" color.



and this is the Pfefferneussen. this is my favorite, because of its, as ben says, "spindliness". it's sorty spidery (not that that wins any points with ben.) the tail of this fly is made from pearl krystal flash strung with silver and gold star sequins, and with natural silk. the body is made from hackle flash in the color "root beer".

on giant size 1 hooks, they make lovely tree ornaments.

some friends are receiving these holiday flies as gifts. i am presenting them along with this ornament, which looks for all the world like a jean cocteau drawing.





my own flies may live year round now on my stick cactus in my front window. i think a little wear and tear and sun bleaching only really enhances the look of a fly.

heh.

yeah.

lying in bed last night, i thought about this bead, which had been given to me by a knitblog buddy quite some time ago. and i thought, hey...

i like this! i did the best dubbing (that's when you more or less spin that fuzzy stuff on a waxed thread) and best whip-finish yet.

in addition to the skull bead and dubbing, there's peacock hurl on the body.

i like it!

the news is good. i really like doing this as much as i thought i would. maybe a little more!

i made two more flies this weekend -- one on a size one hook, like my first one, and the other on a size two. the higher the number, the smaller the hook. these are still good and earring-sized, and i was happy with them (although the whip-finish on the one in the middle is a little sloppy.)

again, i'm only following in a very general way the recipes in my books -- because i'm not trying to catch any fish. these flies don't have to look like anything that's ever lived on this earth. they just have to be pretty! pretty... and deadly.

i have attempted to squash down the barb on each of my hooks, but have no answer yet for handling the point of the hook itself. i like how it looks and don't want to change it very much. i like the sharpness of them.

i had this idea that i would tie some flies for ben's dad for his birthday this month. ones that would more or less work. ben was excited about this idea, but then showed me some of his own old fishing flies. i was a bit daunted when seeing how very, very small they were compared to what i was doing.

i didn't think i'd be able to tie anything so small with my sapling skills. and i tried, and was correct. i couldn't. so that idea will have to go on the back burner for awhile.

seeing ben's flies, though, got me all excited. because they are so beautiful, and some of them have been used -- in the water!! something about the wear and tear on them made them all the more exciting to me. like a lace tablecloth at a yard sale, you know?

i asked ben if i could keep them and he said i could, so now they are part of my "notions" drawer, like buttons and sequins. i have some ideas about what to do with them.

would anyone like a pair of non-matching and dangerous earrings? just ask. i'm feeling quite generous.

when my ex-husband came over last week and saw the book 101 deadly trout flies and various bags of hackle and whatnot lying around the living room, he said, "did you just wake up one day and decide, 'i'm going to start tying flies?'"

"yes," i said, "but it was a day about ten years ago." as though that was somehow to my credit.

"and are you going to decorate an entire christmas tree with them?" he then asked.

i began to picture what he would look like dangling from the end of a large and festive hook. because he was right.

my interest in flies began in 1993 -- after reading the short story "the golden darters" by elizabeth winthrop in the best american short stories of 1992 volume. 1992 -- it was quite a year for short stories, and i was just beginning to recognize my commitment to the form.

short stories. fly-tying. everything relates to everything these days. i'm my own bottom-feeder.

next week, we are going to be going out towards upstate new york and the esopus creek, a fly-fishing and tubing paradise, apparently. we will be staying at kate's lazy meadow, because we need our outdoorsy times to have the feel of a B-52's video. we like it like that.

here is my first fly. it's not meant for catching anything fishlike. it's a "brassie" nymph, and unusually large. earring-sized, i'd say!

pictures of fly-tying at the foot of the catskill mountains will be forthcoming. it's a promise!