After tying up the Upside Down Snake, I reflected on just how few materials it took to make the bug. Not counting the hook and thread, I only used deerhair, lead wire, and a rabbit strip.

I've long been a fan of elegant simplicity, so I throw the following gauntlet on the ground: What is the most interesting, best looking, or best working fly you can tie with the fewest number of materials? For the purpose of this little exercise, we won't count the hook or the thread as materials. Also, just to make things interesting, a different color of the same material will count as another material. The fly doesn't have to be something tied specifically for this thread, or even recently.

Because we can sometimes over-complicate this whole fly flinging thing, I'm interested to see what y'all come up with to simplify it.

Today I am tying The Usual. It is hook, thread, and showshoe rabbit feet hair. You can't get much simpler than that. :-)
It is a Fran Betters fly.

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/features/oldflies/part439.php

Simple and effective - a white clouser minnow:

hook
thread
white bucktail
lead eyes (or equivalant)

When I gaze into my crystal ball I see many bream slurping down some of the Usual.

If you pick the right feather, a briminator can be done with

hook
thread
beadchain
1 feather

one of my all time favorites.

That's a good point to bring up here simply because of the whole concept of one-material flies; which I personally think is pretty well an elegant thing.

Tied this one (the ones in the back) only has peacock herl by your rules. Tied out of my bonefish flies book


By far the simplest fly I have tied.

If I can get my rear out of bed tomorrow, I'm gonna try them out!
A friend of mine who recently passed, loved this fly. I have never tried it before. But today I finally decided to take them off the TO DO LIST, and get busy. I made several. If they are good, I can give a couple to my friends that I'm with tomorrow. I think bream will like it for sure. Maybe even a crappie? Knowing my luck the catfish will be after it....rotfl.

I like the two in the front row a lot!

gurglers can be tied without legs and are very effective; that is one piece of foam; two with legs(edit: yeah, I forgot about the tail!!bad choice)-p-

this is brilliant!

I bet this would work

I accept!

size 10 streamer and some thread. I bent it in the middle and added chartruese thread. I'm sure a bluegill would bite. After that i figured that may be too simple so i added some rubber and wahlah! I came up with multiple variations, one that looks somewhat like a cap spider, one looking neatly like a dragonfly, and a crawdad variation.

I think I will will nick name them "Strech Armstrongs"



Enjoy!

The ones in the back are a Brad Kistler design "Brad's Tailbone" from Dick Brown's book.

The front ones are a mini crab fly from the same book, but look more like a little urchin to me. The wing on those is moose if I remember correctly, tired those up a few months ago.

I like those stretch Armstrongs Gib.

As simple as the materials are in the Tailbone, posting the mass amount of herl all together is a bit of a pain.