Attaching a Woolly Bugger Hackle

Video Transcript

"The next step is to attach our hackle and you can put the hackle on either way. You can attach the thin end and go forward or you can attach the thick end and go forward, and it's going to affect the way the fly looks. If you attach the thin end back here and go forward, the fly is going to sort of have a thicker cross section up here and then sort of taper down toward the tail, or if you have a hackle that doesn't have much taper to it, it's not going to make that much difference in the way the fly looks. I like to attach the thin end of the feather to the hook first and then taper it forward, so I'm just going to put it down, kind of pinch it between my two fingers, make a few wraps around it. Three or four to lock it down. Now since this is the last material I'm going to put on here, I'm going to go ahead and take my thread to the front of the hook and prepare for palmering these materials on the hook, so I'm just going to go ahead and bring my thread up here. And now's the time if you did want to kind of smooth this out, you could do a few extra thread wraps here to build up a little bit more, just to kind of smooth this underbody out so that it's not so lumpy when you're tying it. Or, if you want to add some additional weight, you could wrap some lead wire here to make this heavier. You just want to remember to just sort of keep that nice and smooth under the other material so you don't have a lumpy underbody."