We have been having a few problems with the boiler which is inside a cupboard in the bedroom upstairs. Without going into too much detail, it has gone kaputt and water was leaking out of it and down through the ceiling into the electricity cupboard below (
I know). Even though it wasn't working properly, we thought it had stopped leaking, but this morning there was loads of water and it had soaked into all sorts of stuff including one of the big boxes I had that was full of old fish mags. I haven't looked them in a looooooong time. Anyway, most of them were ok, but towards the bottom of the box, some were quite wet. Once the boiler was in safe hands with the local plumber, I started taking out the soaking wet magazines to see if I could open them up to dry them out. One of the semi-wet ones was an issue of PFK from back in January 1997, and as it was taken out of the box, it fell apart to the centre spread, which, unbelievably was an article on how to make your own cardboard clown loach! 
This is weird, because I don't recall it being in the mag:
Of course, I had to have a go. I had actually planned on making a shoal of them, but to be honest, I found it very fiddly, so mine will have to be content sitting near my tank of real ones!
Here is the diagram you will need to print out if you wish to make your own. I printed this straight onto card so that I didn't have to faff about too much:
Then I cut all the bits out:
Scored them where needed, then glued them all together, as per the instructions above (shown in pic number 2):
It's body shape isn't perfect, but it's not bad! I reckon one of us arty types (not me because I really haven't got much spare time at the moment, and probably should not have wasted a few hours doing this!) could refine the shape a bit better, and even create new diagrams for different botiid species (Martin, Tanja, Rocco??!
).Hope you enjoy, it was a nice find during all the panic this morning!
Emma
