Hey Stanton
The thing with fly tying materials, is that you should have a good base of materials which allow you to tie multiple flies. This is a good base, but things like CDC puffs are very specialised.
What I would honestly do is go to Frontier Flyfishing and ask the guys there for a good list of beginners materials or find a cheapish kit online to buy. Once you have the base materials you can start experimenting on a few different flies. The more you practise the better you will get.
The most important thing I found that improved my tying was proportion. Once you get your eye in for the right size of which part of the fly, you will start tying much better.
To answer your question, yeah you can substitute the colour threads no problem, I generally used more orange than red - and the standard brown and olive bugger marabou is a bread and butter staple for many flies, so its definitely worth getting.
Jade
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