Filling Orders and Changing Patterns

In the past few weeks, we have received a large number of orders.  We are currently making our way through them and nearing completion.  We did make some changes recently to two of our poppers.  We did this for two reasons.  First, the hackle craze.  I've had a hackle craze post in the back of my mind for some time.  Sadly, I never got around to it.  Pretty much everyone in the fly fishing community knows now what happened the past two years regarding hackle.  It became very hard to find due to demand being very high and supply being very low.  This also caused the price to rise to almost astronomical dollar amounts.  I saw some on eBay recently for three and four hundred dollars.  Really?  You want me to pay four hundred dollars for some feathers?  Yea....no.  All this because a hair dresser in Denver, CO decided that they looked great in women's hair.  Simply amazing.  Anyways, we had to change the Chili Frog due to hackle.  We were nearing the end of our green hackle so we made a decision to change the way the Chili Frog looked.  We went with orange barred grizzly hackle instead of the green hackle we were using.  This in turn caused us to change the tail from orange calf tail to kelly green calf tail.  Neither of these changes necessitated us changing the painting of the Chili Frog.  In that regard, it still looks the same....awesome!

Old Style Chili Frog

New Style Chili Frog 

The second reason we changed something was because we have found the round rubber legs to be more buoyant and durable than the sili legs.  I have already done a post showing how the new Fish Foolin' Frog will look with the new legs.  We used to use sili legs on it but switched to the barred round rubber we have been using on everyone else but the Popper Smurf.  We also used sili legs for the Popper Smurf.  In an effort to stream line our process and make a better product, we decided to go with black round rubber legs for the Popper Smurf.  Again, nothing changed with the painting of the Popper Smurf.  Like the Chili Frog, it still looks amazing.  

Old Popper Smurf

New Popper Smurf 

A quick word about the photographs, Melissa has been feeling a bit artsy as of late and was playing around with the filters on the camera.  Trust us, everything is the same but what was noted above.  Thanks.