My First Ties

With all the new members coming on the forum and saying how bad their first tries look, I just had to go dig around in my basement and see if I could find some of my first. Don't laugh too hard, these probably weren't my 1st attempts, but close. Guessing somewhere between 6th & 8th grade (20 yrs. ago) and had only a 50 page book to learn by. When I found crappie.com, my tying skill improved a little. :rolleyes:

This is my brain.......

http://www.rogerslake.org/images/101_0664_e.jpg
http://www.rogerslake.org/images/101_0666_e.jpg
http://www.rogerslake.org/images/101_0668_e.jpg


This is my brain on Crappie.com.........

http://www.rogerslake.org/images/101_0553_e.jpg

I loved spinning deer hair back then, was one of the first real "tricks of the trade" I learned. Even the ugly jigs caught fish too. ;) I don't have too many old jigs, I cut them down cause they were too expensive to get more, hooks were cheap. :)

Anyone else have any of their first tries hiding in the closet? Lets see them.

Pretty sophisticated looking for first ties. Great man, those look great. Much better than my pile of feathers.

"gene"

Guessing somewhere between 6th & 8th grade

Heck, I was still trying to learn how to tie my shoes, but I've always been a SLOW learner & a FAST forgeter!! LOL

Those are pretty damn good Attica for first ties!!!
A whole lot better than as PawPaw said "the pile of feathers" and especially
maribou from my first ones. Being a confident person, I took em fishing anyway. My first clue was when a crappie came up to the surface and asked"
what in the world is that"? I said it's my new jig, to which he replied, not in my world it ain't!!! So I took my jigs home, threw them away (didn't want to polute the lake!) and started all over again. After 2 or 3 hundred more ties and a lot of help from "real tiers" I'm not ashamed of them any more......well
maybe a few of them:D

My first ties ended up in the lake. I threw the jokers in there. To me they were garbage. Two months later I caught some fish at that lake. You guessed it. Some had my original jigs in their belly. I guess they liked them.

You caught fish on them I'm sure,if they didn't you probably wouldn't be tying now. I started without the aide of a book and used to tie my thread in knots onto the hook shank.I wish I still had a few of my first ties to how much better the ones I do now are.Of course better materials like we have now make tying easier,quality of the materials make a huge difference.

Haven't been tying but a few months so you've already seen my firsts, and I've posted many since. I had an advantage in that I got to watch folks that knew the ropes before I picked up a piece of thread. Your firsts weren't bad for a kid using scrounged materials. If those were mine I would mount em in a shadowbox or something to keep them for the years to come.