Editor’s Note: Your family and friends will enjoy making these lures, while you’re practicing social distancing during the Covid-19 problems.

The quickest, easiest, most-productive fishing lures to make are jigs. The good news is that you can build a bunch of jigs at home on a rainy day, when you can’t go fishing or while watching TV. My grandkids enjoy this craft project too. Hobby Lobby, Michaels and other craft stores have a wealth of supplies for making hundreds of fantastical jigs. I buy the shot leads and hooks from a tackle store.

I start with the basic ingredient I learned from Curt Edney so many years ago – knitting yarn. I particularly like the knitting yarn with several colors in each strand and the strands of glitter thread similar to Christmas tree tinsel to give the jigs flash. I’ll put both of these in the slit of the shot lead.

This past year I found a new product that makes fashioning your own lures quicker, simpler and easier. I bought different colors of strong adhesive tape that I could cut into strips to wrap around the straight part of the hook from behind the shot lead head to the bend of the hook to build-up the body of the jig. Then I placed strands of knitting and glitter yarn and any other components I planned to use in my jig on the tape, as I continued to wrap and make the body. However, I must issue a warning. Crafting fishing lures is very addictive, especially if you have a wide variety of component parts to experiment with to add to your lures.

To learn more about crappie fishing, check out John E. Phillips’ book, “Catch Crappie All Year: Fishing a Single Pole, Using No Boat and Farming Crappie,” available in Kindle, print and Audible at http://amzn.to/1DBpnNh.

Tomorrow: How to Make a Bottle Cap Lure to Catch Fish