Tying pattern damselfly

After watching the short film “Damsels in distress” I made a wingburner for the damselfly.

Place a print in the wingburner. Cut away the film close to the wingburner.

Burn the edges with a sigarette lighter. To burn the narrow space between the wings I use a small soldering burner which has a fine flame. To prevent the wingburner from overheating cool down several times. Take your time. The soldering burner I use, the portasol p-1k. I use this tool only to burn narrow spaces when a normal flame doesn’t work. A hot needle or a cauter will also do the job.

Remove the wing, it should look like this. Place the wing in the wingburner to remove the tag.

Trim the tag and burn the edge. The finished wing. The black spots on the wings are tiny weights for balancing the damsel in flight.

Set up thread onto the hook shank. Take a piece of mono, I use 0,50mm and burn one end. The result should be a thicker end of about 5mm length as shown on the image. Trial and error to get a good result. Trim the other end at a total length of 35 mm. Use pliers to rib and flatten the end.

Tie in the nylon body with the flattened end onto the hookshank. Use fine sandpaper or thinner for roughening the surface of the nylon and color the body black.

Apply some blue dubbing on the thread. Make a small blue backend with the dubbing.

Tie in two strips of foam (2,5mm wide) pointing backwards. Tie in the blue strip on top of the black one. Split the tying thread and apply some black cdc fibers in the loop. Twist the thread.

Wind the cdc around the hookshank. Strike down the cdc fibers and pull the blue strip of foam over the fibers towards the hookeye. Tie down the blue strip of foam.

Trim the waste end of foam. Use some glue to fix the wing on top of the blue foam.

Pull the black strip of foam over the wing forward and tie down with some turns of thread. Apply some blue dubbing on the thread.

Take a small piece of mono to form the eyes. I use 0,50mm mono, same as the body. Put the mono in a tweezer and melt both sides to form two even balls using a sigarette light.

Tie in the eye using the blue dubbing. Make some figure of eight wraps around the eyes. Tie off and your damsel is ready.