Tie every day a fly for one year? Hold my beer!

While I'm at home during these chaotic and uncertain time now, I'm looking back at the past year full of fly tying every day. I wanted to write about it for a few weeks and I think now is the best time to travel back in the past to where all had other things in mind than a damn virus.

It all began in the end of 2018 where I read an article about how become a better fly tyer. In this article one of the tips was to tie every day a fly for one year and this got me interested.
How would it like to be tying every day one fly for the whole year?
This got me damn curious so I got a new years confession for 2019. All materials were already present cause I have so much tying materials already bought and the only lack of resource would probably hooks, so I ordered some more than usual to be prepared.

So and then 2019 started and I was full of power to manage tying every day a fly. The first days were running quite well because of free days and weekend. But as I started to go back to work, it was a bit more difficult to manage regarding the time for tying.

While going to work 11 Hours per day, girlfriend, cooking,  take care of the house and garden as well as playing football. All needed time so it wasn't quite easy to manage tying each day, so I had to change my habits and I got up earlier than normal to tie before going to work.
As I have no problem in getting up early, this was the way I could focus on tying in the morning and doing all other stuff during the day as normal without the pressure to tie in the afternoon. But of course I used every free minute to go into the tying cave, which my girlfriend also noticed and she wasn't that happy about that :)


In the first few weeks I had so much ideas and patterns to tie in my mind so it was no problem to deliver a fly every day. One important thing was that I was able to prepare the stuff I needed. This is a real time saver when it comes to the tying part.
When every material is on the desk and prepared, tying is much faster than searching for the stuff and cutting, tapering, etc. it while tying.
You can focus much more on your tying instead of having the need to search and cut your stuff.

Therefore I made me these really simple prepping racks from foam and some strips of wood. Sure I could have painted them to look nicer, but I'm quite a functional guy so this wasn't really needed in my eyes.
With these I could prep all materials better and reduce the time for tying enormously.

But sometimes I really struggled to "produce" the flies, because it just wasn't possible to tie. Like when I was in holidays with my girlfriend or gone fishing during the weekend. Sure my goal was to tie every day, but I think I wouldn't be alive anymore if I had taken my tying stuff for our Mallorca holiday trip :)
So I've tied two or more flies in the mornings after the holidays to get back on the current day.

One thing I really wanted to keep an eye on during the year was not to tie the same pattern every time in different colors, but instead I wanted to tie a lot of different patterns to improve also my abilities of different tying techniques with different materials.
Buggers, small streamers, big streamers, articulated ones and many other came out of my vice during this year. Either freestyle versions or inspired by the big amount of tyers on YT and IG.
For sure some patterns appeared more than once, but when you find a working pattern on the water, would you tie only one? :)

Sometimes I really struggled to tie on my desk, cause the material of previous streamer was still on the desk. It was always the same, tie a pattern, take picture and the tie an new one. So sometimes there was a big mess on the desk which took some time to clean up.
Also in nearly every room of our house was flash, synthetics, feathers or bucktail. Even after cleaning all rooms it didn't took long and you could find again flash or other stuff. If you consider to tie more and regular, think about getting you a good vac cleaner.

Another big change was while I had to move the tying cave into another room. I used this move a an opportunity to change my organization of tying materials, cause I noticed that I hate to search for materials when I have a limited time for tying in the morning.
It can be quite annoying when you search for a specific material but don't find it in the boxes it should contained in.
Therefore now most of everything is hanging on the wall behind me and I only need to turn around to get all materials I need.

Same was done with all small stuff like beads, cones, rattles and dumbells. All is organized in boxes to find the needed ones as fast as possible.

Looking back at the past year, the coolest thing I noticed is that my tying skills have been improved quite well. In the beginning there were quite a lot of patterns and streamer which were that ugly and out of proportion, that they directly went into the garbage or cut open again.
For sure some I kept to show them, like the ones below. But after a while these "bad" ones disappeared and most of the flies were looking quite well and fishy. But maybe only because I tied streamer in my comfort zone? I'll never know :)

But I would never say I'm a pro when it comes to tying, no way.
There are so many things I need to improve and for sure there are techniques and patterns I've never heard from.
At least in times like now we all have a lot of time trying new patterns and techniques to improve our abilities in tying flies and streamer.