I am, among other things, a fly-tyer. I’ve been tying flies since about 1982 or so. It is a wonderfully creative and fulfilling emotional outlet. You tie your own flies and catch fish on them. Great sense of satisfaction. ~ View On Black (large shows the various details and interactions of differing materials) These are called “wigglers.” These were tied for steelhead (a rainbow trout that is born in fresh water, goes to sea to live, and returns to its freshwater stream to spawn) and were done sometime circa 1990 – ’95. I must admit my art background came in handy for artsy-fartsy things done by hand, such as tying flies. A knowledge of color, proportion, materials, use of hands and tools, helps as I tend to think of flies as mini-sculptures: useable and lose-able pieces of art. If they catch one fish – they were worth the effort made to tie them. These are about an inch-to-a-inch-and-a-half long. Some tyers tie flies as art, some as craft. The difference? Art is the flies that come from your mind, heart and hand; craft is dedicatedly following the tying instructions from a book – making picture perfect duplicates. No two of mine will be the same - which can be a blessing or a bit of a curse, if you believe that fish, on any given day, will only take a pink-headed wiggler, with three wraps of badger hackle, and all the rest of yours have four..... :-( Anyway, both art and craft-tied flies catch fish equally as well, but the art ones can always be identified as done by you, and they capture the hearts of other fly tyers as well as fish; a small difference in the overall scheme of things, but nice when you can do both. The creativity comes in that, once you know the basic form and proportions (tail, body, ribbing, thorax, legs, gills, wingcase, head, antennae) for the various types of wigglers, the rest – colors and materials - is wide open and up to you. When you succeed and get things right, you’ll know it. When you don’t, well, you’ll kind of know that too. I guess that could be a casual description for a lot of things us flickites do: art, writing, photography, music, cooking, or just enjoying life. If you don’t fish, or fish with flies, all of this, the writing and the imagery, may be absolutely meaningless for you. But, I thank you for your indulgence.