It's apparent there are some good fishermen and fly tiers here and thus I thought I'd try to get some advice.

I recently started fly tying again after a number of years and was never that great at tying the smaller patterns. I did a lot of saltwater tying where I had lots of room to make successive thread wraps near the eye of the hook, making a secure and tightly-wrapped fly. This weekend I was looking over some of the nymphs I've tied in the last month and wasn't too impressed. I have a PT's, Prince Nymph's and some GRHE's and noticed a few things: First off, I try to weight my flies so that they will get down to the feeding zone of the fish, but I think the addition of lead might be the begining of my problem. I usually wrap the lead from about the hook point up towards the hook shank, leaving some room (approximately what would be equal to two more lead wraps) near the eye of the hook. I add my materials, from the bend of the hook to the eye, but it always seems that when I'm finishing the fly I either have to make a good number of thread wraps over each other to build up the head area, which sometimes want to unravel towards the eye of the hook or some of the material is left sticking out near the eye looking unsightly and sometimes causing problems with threading the fly on the leader. Before adding materials, my lead wrapped fly looks similar to a double tapered fly line, in the fact that I add tapered thread wraps behind the wire and tapered thread wraps in front of the wire, to take up the disproportionate space between the wire on the hook shank and the unwrapped shank at the bend of the hook and the eye of the hook. Now, I've thought maybe it's as simple as using a smaller gauge wire or just less wraps but I wasn't really sure.

My other problem, which is that when adding the hackle portion (legs near the thorax region) to a fly such as the pheasant tail, how does one get that uniform look on either side? I've tried cutting a "V" notch in the feather and lashing it down under the wing casing portion of the fly, but that didn't work too well for me, therefore, I usually just try to take a few fibers from the hackle and secure them on either size of the hook with a few thread wraps. Crude but it has seemed to work.

Lastly, what would you say is the best securing agent for the thread near the eye of the hook. There are some head cements out there that seem to leave a white residue over the thread wraps that ruin the appearance of the fly and don't really secure the thread that well.

I hope most can get the gist of my problems and give me some advice so I can start making better looking flies. Thank you.