Not all crafters are the same beast

Part 2 of Duck Tape nirvana

So, I've come to the conclusion that there are many different kinds of crafters.

There are those who are unbelievably meticulous about their crafts. They plan out their crafts in meticulous detail and execute them with the same rigorous attention to measurements, adornments, final appearance, and photogenic excellence. These are what I like to call the Meti-Crafters. The internet is full of them. They are the folks making beautiful crafts, posting thorough and meticulous tutorials with plenty of in-process pictures.

Then there are crafters who are highly specialized in one area. They do one kind of craft, they do it very well, and they do it in great volumes, seemingly unable to stop themselves from creating more and more and more. They sometimes create highly complicated forms of what may look like a simple craft because they have created so many they eventually compulsively make the craft more complicated than it starts out to be. These are our OCD-Crafters. They are the ones making youtube videos of their unstoppable crafting and then speeding it up into fast motion for our perusal as the measurements and directions are posted across their lightning fast handiwork.

There are other sub-categories of crafters I am still identifying as I wade through the world of internet crafting. But more on that later.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not casting derisions upon the afore-mentioned character types. Because the fact is the quality of their crafts far outshines my meager offerings executed for myself and a very small circle of friends who tolerate my madness.

I mean only to explain why, even though my niece and I had the best of intentions when we bought all this Duck Tape yesterday, we failed to take enough in-process pictures to fully execute a proper “tutorial” on our design for a Duck Tape purse. As I think I've mentioned before, I tend to get swept up. I am neither a Meti-Crafter or an OCD-Crafter. I'm a Crazy Thrifty Crafter, characterized by my willingness to fly without a net, build without a blueprint, dive in head first, etc.

And so, without further adieu, and because the world would not be any friggin' fun without a variety of crafters on the internet, for your crafting pleasure, my niece Sydney and I bring you our very own Duck Tape Purse Design.

As you may have already surmised by previous posts, my designs are as simple as I can make them. This purse is one large piece of Duck Tape fabric, two side pieces that are simply the width of the Duck Tape, and one long, strap that is also the width of the Duck Tape.

No measuring required here and that's the way we like it. The first piece is going to be the front, the bottom, the back and the flap of the purse. Just one long piece of Duck Tape fabric. Make it however long you wanna make it to make as big a purse as you want. I have no idea how long ours was, but this picture gives you an idea of how much counterspace the strips took up. We used 7 strips across and the pattern was 1 zebra, 2 purple, 1 zebra, 2 purple, 1 zebra.

Making Duck Tape fabric is just a matter of overlapping some strips of tape alongside each other, then covering them with another layer of tape so the colored sides are facing out. We decided on the aqua/teal color for the inside of the purse.



bottom of the purse



Once we had the fabric made, we trimmed the edges to make a straight line. Then we decided how deep the purse would be and laid a couple strips across the inside and outside at the point that would become the bottom of the purse. This gave the bottom of the purse some weight and a natural place for the fabric to fold to become a rectangular bottom.

Then we created two more fabric strips, each one tape-width wide for the sides. Here's where it gets a little tricky. The first one is easy cause you have one open side while you're taping the side piece to the back and front of the inside of the purse. We overlapped some tape strips only slightly on the outside of the front and back so we wouldn't cover up too much of the zebra print (cuz we used pink for the sides). If you were using the same color for the sides as you did for the front and back, this wouldn't matter.



inside of the purse



Then when we got to the second side we were like, how the heck are we gonna do this? It's kind of a pain, but it was certainly easier with two of us. One of us held the side closed with the back and front of the purse while the other person applied the tape on the inside. Doing the outside first is probably easier, but we didn't figure that out til we had already done it.

Then the strap is one long piece of Duck Tape fabric. We cut the inside piece longer than the outside (zebra) piece so we could attach the ends to the inside of the purse. Then we decided to reinforce that with some additional tape inside just in case.

Oh yeah, we attached a small piece of sticky-back velcro on the flap so she could close it and we cut a couple of flowers out of the zebra tape for decoration.

There are TONS of tutorials on youtube and elsewhere on how to make Duck Tape purses. For me, the designs were either too simple and just looked like a sack, or too complicated and looked like they had sucked the fun factor completely out of the craft.

Syd and I made this craft in about an hour. I think it's the coolest craft we ever made.

Colored Duck Tape costs $4 per role. We bought 4 roles and we probably have enough Duck Tape to make another large purse like this plus maybe a wallet. So the Duck Tape nirvana ain't over yet, folks!