We brought home a neat stick from a recent nature hike that was just begging to be incorporated into a mobile of some kind. Plastic bottles soon turned into little fish (to continue our recent theme of under the sea) to round out the project.

First we wanted to spray paint the branch, so I set it outside on newspaper and applied two coats of red and sparkly silver. This gave it such a a neat magical forest look.

We had empty water bottles in the recycle bin, so we twisted each slightly near one end to make fish “tails”. Now decorate all over your fish with glue and tissue paper. Finally, glue wiggle eyes to each fish and then let dry completely.

Note: If we were to repeat the project, I would water down the glue and paint it over the squares of tissue paper, to more securely affix them to each water bottle.

To suspend the fish from your branch, you can use fishing line and a needle if your crafting skills are more advanced than mine. Instead, I simply used floral wire, twisting the wire around the branch at intervals and then around the middle of each “fish”.

Suspend with additional fishing line or floral wire any place outdoors. The fish theme makes this a nice reminder of summer days, since now our forest branch looked almost like driftwood!