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Make your own blowfish lamp

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For you fishermen/women out there, here are some instructions that I found while surfing the web for blowfish lamps:

when you catch a nice blowfish, make a small incision in the belly about an inch to two inches long. Remove the entrails and rinse it out. Note that the skin of a blow fish is very tough, so don't be afraid to yank on it. As a matter of fact, when you go to remove the skin from the tail, you'll need pliers. Once the gut is cleaned out, grab a bit of the skin where you made the incision and begin to pull it up and away from the tail meat. Continue in this fashion until you have the skin removed from the tail. You should now have the meat exposed and the skin hanging loosely on top or to the side. Be careful to keep the tail fin in tact. Again, grab hold of the skin and pull it forward until you get it off the blowfish's head. Be careful to keep the fins in tact. If you're successful, and you should be since the skin is so tough, you should now have a completely skinned blowfish (ready for the deep frier) and its skin. Cut the head away and reserve the tail for supper. Take the skin and give it a good rinse in some VERY WEAK bleach solution, like a cap full to a half gallon of water. Once rinsed with the bleach solution, get your self a decent balloon from a party store. Stick the baloon into the area where you made the first incision and start blowin' into that blowfish skin. Blow it up until the skin is fully expanded. The head area will not fully inflate, that's ok...it doesn't inflate when its alive. Tie a knot in the balloon and hang that little guy in a warm dry spot out of the sunlight so the colors don't fade. Don't seek complete darkness, just away from direct light. Have a little varnish on hand and give the skin a brushing when the skin is dry. The drying process should only take a day or two. Once dry and the varnish sets, pop the ballon. Get a small lamp kit from the hardware store and wire it up. Use some stiff wire to support the blowfish around the bulb. Get some fake eyes out of a tackle supply catalog or from a taxidermy supplier to finish it off. Glue the eyes from the inside with a little super glue. One last thing I forgot to mention earlier, try to keep the teeth attached to the skin by severing the tip of the jaws with a knife. The teeth and jaws are naturally fixed to the skin and will rest nicely in the skin once it's dry. The teeth are cool and make a great finished product. Good luck with this and have fun.

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