Tips on Fly Tying a Whip Finish

Video Transcript

"ALVIN DEDEUX: So, say, we're done with our fly. This is one of the trickier moves to do when it comes to fly tying. It's the whip finish. This is a little tool that allows you to do this whip-finish knot to finish off the end of your fly. The whip-finish knot traps the thread so that it won't slide out or unravel, and this tool makes it pretty easy to do. First thing you want to do is put the hook behind the thread, then bring the thread back over to the back of the tool, slide it down a little ways, then you kind of give it a little twist and what you end up you make like a four shape, right there. Now, what I'm going to do is use this tool to wrap this thread here around this thread and the hook, and that will lock that thread in there. I'm going to give it maybe four, five or six wraps and you can feed more thread with the tool by just giving it a little wiggle and pulling. And then to finish it off, you pop the thread off the back of the tool, like so. And now, you have it hooked in the front of tool and then just pull with the other end of the thread and then pull the hook out at the very end. You can either clip that off when you're done or if you want to really make it extra secure, maybe you don't want to put any glue on it, you just want it--you can do a couple of whip finishes. And then in that way, that thing is really locked in there. So that's the whip finish."