Dubbing wax from my junk drawer

Today I was tying up some soft hackle flys after watching Tight Line Productions video on a soft hackle emerger, see here (BTW Tight Line makes the best instructional videos I have found free on the interwebs. They do an amazing job of explaining everything and showing it in great detail without being boring or drawing on about how to turn the thread). The pattern calls for "touch dubbing" the dubbing mix to the line to give it that loose, buggy, shuck sorta look. Well I don't have any dubbing wax and seeing that I have no desire to go to the fly shop today (mainly because there is no such thing as just buying dubbing wax when visiting the fly shop) I needed to come up with a solution.

Chapstick my friends.

 I have been addicted to the stuff since I was a kid. I didn't want to use my usual stuff since it has a strong sent and is petroleum based so I went digging for an old tube of bee's wax based chapstick. Sure enough in my junk drawer I found a tube that had been through the wash so all of its scent was gone and its rather weird reconstituted nature meant no one was going to be using it again. Not surprisingly it worked perfectly. Dubbing wax is cheap but, this was free.

After coming up with my solution I looked up a few things and came across THIS use of a toilet wax ring for dubbing. This again required me to leave the house but, a sweet idea none the less.

Here is my take on the emerger. It's my take because this was the only soft hackle feather I had and the closest dubbing I had was to mix orange nylon made from yarn (see my previous post on that HERE) and some light tan dubbing. Also I was just given some turkey feathers from my brother and was eager to give those a spin.