Use lawn chair material to make your own lure skirts for trolling for marlin, sailfish and more.
Jim Rizzuto
For a colorful, durable, effective and inexpensive lure skirt, you can use "chair grass" made for lawn chairs. Proven for decades, the vinyl material is flexible enough to follow most types of lure heads and stiff enough to avoid tangling with the hooks. Here are three easy ways to rig this material to make your own lure skirts.
Multicolored lawn chair webbing comes in solids and stripes, three inches wide. A 100-foot-long roll usually costs less than $20. If you can't find it at your hardware store, look online.
For a small lure head like the pusher shape shown above, cut a length twice as long as the skirt you want. Then use the scissors to cut the material up the center to create two "ribbons."
A skirt with three ribbon strips works well when doubled back to create a full skirt. Position the three ribbons evenly around the stem of the lure head and tie them securely to the groove closest to the front of the lure.
Now fold the ribbons back into the position they will run as skirts. Tie the ribbons with secure wraps around the second tail groove using rigging floss or braided line.
Pull the ribbons apart and strip away the cross threads that had held the straps together. This is very easy to do after you've tried it once or twice.
Leave enough cross fibers right behind the wrap to keep the tail fibers from getting too wild.
You are now finished if you want to be, but I like to take it one step further...
To add more flash and color, I cut a short overskirt from a sheet of glow-in-the dark plastic. The over skirt also protects the wrapping from getting snagged and pulling free.
You can also attach lengths of webbing to a strip of duct tape to help secure the skirt in position. We've already stripped out the cross fibers partway but you can do that later if you prefer. The pink overskirt is cut from a piece of sheet plastic.
The plastic overskirt is positioned in reverse before tying it onto the lure.
The binding for the overskirt also helps secure the chair grass under skirt.
The secret of the pink plastic revealed! I cut it from a discarded beachball, which is in keeping with the frugal nature of using chair grass.
Our third method takes us back to a bigger lure head. We could've used either of the two previously mentioned skirting methods but elected to tie the skirt directly to the second tail section of the lure with no fold back.
Because we plan to use a heavier Naugahyde outer skirt, we tied on a sparse underskirt with just a few ribbons.
After we bound the front ends securely, we stripped the cross fibers of the chair grass.
Here are three different lures rigged and ready to fish. Add a hook-set and you are ready to troll. Total cost to skirt all three lures, less than $5.
