• Turn a plain paper bag into a colorful fish-themed craft project.Empty brown paperbag isolated on white image by sumos from Fotolia.com
  
  Instead of recycling paper bags in the usual way, save them to use for craft projects. Paper bags of all sizes, from small lunch sacks to sturdy department store bags to large grocery bags, make a versatile crafting material. They are useful whether left intact or cut up and repurposed. They can be painted, drawn on and glued. When you are seeking a craft project with a fish theme, there are numerous ways to incorporate paper bags.
  
  

Fish Puppets

• Use a whole paper bag to make a fish puppet, or make a whole school of fish using paper bags of various sizes. The fish puppets are very simple to construct, and there are innumerable possibilities for decoration. Remove the handles from your paper bag with scissors, if it has them. Stuff the bag with scrunched up newspaper or old plastic grocery bags until it is about half full. Scrunch up the top of the bag to contain the stuffing, then secure it with a rubber band. Smooth out the bag top, which now serves as the fish’s tail. To give the fish eyes, a smile, scales and gills, use paint, crayons, stickers or yarn and glue, or any other craft supplies you have at hand. To turn the fish into a puppet, poke a hole in the bottom, insert a dowel and tape it in place.
  
  

Hanging Koi

• This two-sided version of a Japanese hanging koi is easy to make and looks effective when hung from a ceiling or window. Take a plain paper bag and smooth it flat. Draw the outline of a fish on one side of the bag so that the mouth of the fish meets the folded edge at the bottom of the bag. Cut out the fish shape, cutting through both sides of the bag and leaving the fold of the bag intact at the fish’s mouths. You should have two paper fish joined at their mouths. Decorate the fish to look like koi, i.e. with metallic gold, white, black and red patches. Use paint or cut circles of colored paper and glue them to the fish in an overlapping arrangement to resemble scales. Use a different pattern and color combination on each of the fish, and decorate the insides of the paper too for a more complete look. Punch two holes through the fish just below the fold line at their mouths, and attach a loop of string for hanging the koi.
  
  

Fishy Book Cover

• A basic fish outline is an instantly recognizable shape that is easy enough to create with a potato stamp. Cut a large potato in half, draw a fish outline with a marker on the cut surface, then carve the potato from around the outline with a sharp knife. Cut down the sides of a paper grocery bag and smooth the bag out on the table so that you have one large sheet of paper. Use your potato stamp with paint to decorate the paper with fish motifs. Use different colors of paint or just one. Arrange your fish so that they are all “swimming” the same way, create “schools” of fish on different parts of the paper or point the fish in all different directions. You can paint other underwater images in the background and add details such as eyes, smiles and scales with a pen. When the paint is dry, use the paper and some tape to fold a decorative cover around a hardback book.