DIY Tape!

Most everyone who keeps an art journal, makes cards, or creates scrapbooks is familiar with the current “tape craze,” I think—washi tape, fabric tape, colorful electrical tape, even decorative Duck tape. I’m usually the last one on the bandwagon, but tapes are definitely interesting me, and I have a tiny beginner’s supply of my own:

Last week I came across a great tutorial by Julie Balzer about making your own book page tape. I have been using discarded books for some other projects, so it was very easy to pick one up (The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, to be exact), and give the tape project a try.

All I had to do to make the tape, as Julie clearly explains, is put some Scotch tape down on a page of text, rub it with my finger, and pull it up again. You basically pull up the top layer from the page, so the letters from the text adhere to your tape.

Julie mentions that she likes the opacity of her tape. I, on the other hand, was into a little more transparency, so I soaked the tapes in a little bowl of water and used the pad of my finger to rub off some more of the paper pulp from the back. (If you get too aggressive, or get impatient and use a fingernail, you will scrape the text right back off your tape.)

She recommended using a Xyron sticker machine to bring back its adhesiveness, but my tape seemed to keep its stickiness pretty well.

I haven’t used the tape in any projects yet, except to include it on an envelope I sent to my PiF recipient for the 2nd anniversary of WOYWW:

I love Julie’s ingenuity in creating this approach to making book tape, and am looking forward to trying different types of book pages to see if I can get any colors or images to adhere, as well as text.

I am a HUGE fan of clear contact paper transfers (a topic for another post!), so I imagine I could make a transfer of ANY image, and then cut it into strips to make a tape “effect.”

I have been watching how other folks use their tapes in the art journal spreads because so far I haven’t been inspired to use them in mine. I’ll just keep building up my supply, and wait for inspiration to strike!

If you have a journal spread using tapes that you would like to share, I’d love for you to include a link in the comments!

Happy taping!