Let’s take a look at a video of how the pattern is formed. The wrap itself is broken down into three different steps which are the eye, the body, and then the fins/tail. Once you finish wrapping the fish, you simply just fill in the background until the wrap is completely closed.
There is no spacing for this pattern, this is based entirely on what size you want to make the fish. In this course, my blank is 15 mm diameter and I originally spaced the fins and tail at 3.6 mm and had to pack that side of the pattern in because it was getting too big. I would say, measuring out somewhere between 2 to 2.5 mm should work for most blanks, however bigger surf blanks could definitely handle that 3.5 mm or larger. It all depends on style so just know that you might need to shift some thread around. Patterns that don’t have set spacing are ones that we just have to go into the wrap knowing, we might have to shift thread, and that’s ok. Look at it as packing practice.
Watching the video you see that we start with a diamond for the eye. Once the eye is wrapped it’s time to start wrapping the body. In our split fish, we are doing stripes. If you don’t want stripes then wrap a solid color going from the tip side anchor to the butt side anchor. We are wrapping a chevron towards the butt so in the DOWN direction. The belly of the fish is white in this pattern which starts at the butt tape anchor and wraps up towards the tip.
When we start to wrap the fins and the tail, we will be boxing UP (towards the tip) in order to create the fins and tail. We are using the exact pattern from Billy’s book with the x4 threads per pass. If you want to use a +1 instead of the x4 then you absolutely can do that. The fins and tail will grow a little slower and will curve more. The x4 version makes the fins bigger faster. Once you are happy with how large your fish is, then we simply close the background however we want.
