Hamish, I will not rise to any references to my deer hair mountain.
What can I say, it is all good quality, carefully selected for particular jobs as it is such a variable material.
Do I have spare patches, well yes one or two!
I have struggled with sorting out my tying materials at home and also for travelling and have now arrived at the following.
Travelling kit - take a little of everything you think you will need and place these materials in seperate clear zip lock bags, label them well and organise like materials together, say half a dozen saddle hackles of the same colour in a bag and as many bags of the hackles in the colours you think you will need in a larger bag. It does take some time to sort it out but once completed you have a reasonably compact set up that will not induce a hernia when you try to pick it up off the floor.
I am getting there with this set up, once completed it will be a perfect bag to take to the tying club, on holiday, or working away from home. I have settled on a Lowepro camera backpack for this, I have been using this bag for a couple of years. I threw out the dividers that came with the bag as they were very bulky. I am trying to sort out thinner ones. Tamrac make similar camera backpacks, they both have internal pockets for a vice and tying tools and once you sort you gear into smaller quantities you have the perfect travelling tying bag.
I did go down the road of bagging up the materials for certain patterns / styles of flies and leaving them bagged up, loch style wets, nymphs, bugs, streamers, saltwater etc !!! but that got out of hand (hard to believe eh!) and I have changed things a little to try to only have a travel kit of a little of most things rather than needing to trailer to carry my tying bag.
At home, I am using plastic food containers for similar material and store these in larger clear crates a bit like the ones Iain uses, I think this is the best option for home storage, safe from little flying creatures and also easy to locate when you need a particular colour of something etc. All you have to do is print out labels to clearly show what is in each crate.
Good luck with the journey, it is a journey, I am not sure if you ever get to the final destination with this but as long as you can find what you are looking for quickly that should be good enough. I wish I could say I have arrived at that point just now but I am still trying to rationalise things.
Good luck and let us know how you get on.
I forgot to say, you do probably need a few more patches of deer hair, everyone does or is it just me.
Kev.
