Phil Middleton tell's you what he loves about Vicuna Dubbing!

I was lucky enough to meet Faye and David back in 2019 and our relationship has developed into a great friendship.

In my humble opinion, the beauty of Vicuna Dubbing is it’s nice and buggy but is also really easy to dub into a noodle. The Standard Dubbing can be formed into a tight noodle for scud bodies, or a really loose noodle to form a thorax…and I never use wax to form my dubbing noodles, the dubbing is that easy to use. I use wax to add grip on the thread and I don’t want the thread to grip the dubbing, I want the dubbing to wrap round the thread, unhindered.

 Anyway, I’ve mentioned bodies and thoraxes, but I use dubbing in other areas of my flies as well:

• It is great for tails – my Red Tags all have Vicuna Dubbing in Scarlet Red for their tails (it has more movements than floss or wool).
• Egg sacks on Caddis flies – yep – I’d recommend (because I’ve used) Limerick Green.
• Breathers on Buzzers / Chironomids – I’ve used dubbing for breathers since I got my dirty mitts on some Vicuna Dubbing. I recommend Standard Cream for this a) because it has more natural movement than any of the synthetic materials used for breathers and b) nothing in nature is bright white like the synthetic materials…cream is more akin to the naturals.
• Hackles – dubbing can be used in the same way as Hare or Deer Hair – use the split thread technique, add your Vicuna Dubbing of choice and twizzle (technical term!). You will have a nice hackle that cloaks the fly.

Fly size is also not too much of an issue when using Vicuna Dubbing. I have used it on size 8 stillwater lures (the orange monstrosity pictured), all the way down to size 20 Caenis Fly imitations for rivers (also pictured).

Really the only limitation is your imagination…tight turns everyone!

by Phil Middleton