This fun fish wall hanging is a perfect summer activity that uses recycled materials and items from nature. We created our fish from water bottles and combined them with sea shells from our painted shell activity.
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Supplies:
- Water bottles (Soft plastic is best. The Coke bottles are a little too stiff for cutting and stapling)
- Permanent markers
- Stapler
- Scissors
- Tissue paper and feathers for the tail
- Safety pins to pin to the top of the fish
- Shells (we live fairly close to the beach so we got ours fresh from the sea but you can find an assorted mix at a craft store or here)
- A branch and string for hanging
Start by decorating your water bottle with Sharpie markers for your fish. Make sure to add an eye on each side.
When the fish is complete, use sharp scissors to cut off the end of the bottle.
Staple the end shut with tissue paper and feathers. We glued a couple extra feathers on top to cover the staples.
We took our painted shells from our last project and glued beads to the back. This allowed us to string up the shells. We created several strands of shells with blue and green string and tied them to a yarn stick we made earlier this year (a plain stick would work too!)
We attached safety pins to the top of our fish so we could tie them to the string of shells.
In the picture above, it shows our finished wall hanging being hung with yarn…we later changed that to string (several strands together) after it came crashing down! The yarn started shredding off because the weight of all of the shells. Oops!
Give this a try next time you have some empty water bottles on hand!
Pin this for later!
I also made these water bottle fish later with my students. See how they turned out!