Best Flies for Beginners: The Top 7

Our Favorite Flies to Get You Started

The Venerable Hare's Ear

We recently did a list of 4 simple "getting started flies" and we were surprise by the number of positive responses from people who were just getting started tying. We realize a lot of our patterns here are very technical, so we've spent a lot of time recently getting back to basics. We've re-done several tutorials and have now completed our series of the 7 basic patterns every fly tyer should learn. These patterns will showcase different techniques, materials and tools to help round out your tying skills in order to move on to more complicated patterns and also help you build your own creative patterns or variations.

Not only that, we've also compiled a few curated fly tying kits on our website that correspond to these patterns. So if you're really just starting out, we've got the materials, tools and vises to go along with these tutorials. You literally have no excuse to learn to tie now.

Before you get too far, we've outlined a series of steps to get started. You can refer to our Fly Tying 101 classes here or a summarized list below:

1. Get Supplies: See what we recommend here.
2. Take the basics classes: Learn the basic techniques you need to know before ever tying a fly
3. Learn the flies listed below
4. Practice
5. Practice
6. See 4 and 5
7. Move onto any of the other patterns listed on our site. You're a pro now. ;)

So let's get started! Click each pattern to see the video tutorial and associated recipe. Each recipe has links to the materials in the online store. Or you can click here to get all materials for all flies in one fell swoop.

1. Zebra Midge