Do you?

I just spent a couple of days going through all my fly tying stuff, my books and my fly fishing odds and ends. I have a corner in the house where I store all that stuff, and that corner had become quite messy. Now, if you're like me - and I think a lot of fly anglers are - you don't part with stuff easily. I tend to save almost anything for a rainy day, and during my cleaning sessions I have found all kinds of strange things, which I originally saved and now could put in the trash after having stored them for a few years. One of the things I have always been very keen on saving is old flies - my own and other's. I have no particular system for this, but just tend to stuff them in bags and boxes in no particular order. Add to that all the flies I people have sent me over the years, and you get the picture: bags, boxes, envelopes, cans and what-have-you with mixed flies. Most of them are just dunked in there and the result is a mess of feather and hooks. Look at the picture below. That is one such box with my own flies. Some known patterns, some experiments and some flies out of this world! One day I'll go through them and take out the most interesting ones for photography. Then I'll publish an article on GFF with the results. Until then I'll just stick them back in the box where I found them, but this time store them in a larger box with the label "GFF flies". This box now holds all the flies, which are wating to find their way to the site.