Duct Tape Purse

By Vicky Nardone

I definitely did not come up with this idea myself, but I saw it and thought it was really cool and it actually only took about half an hour to put together.  I think I'm going to use mine to carry my knitting and crocheting supplies back and forth to the weekly meetup I sometimes attend.  Anyway, to give credit where credit is due, I first saw this project on the Second Chances blog and they actually got it from the All Things Thrifty blog which has the instructions for how to make them.  I really like how the ones on Second Chances turned out.  The one thing I don't like about mine is that you can see the lines between the pieces of green tape.  Otherwise I'm happy with how it came out.  I really like the polka dot tape pattern.

This bag only requires three materials: duck tape (yes I do mean duck and not duct), scissors and a piece of fabric.  Duck tape is really cool - it comes in all different types of patterns and it's about $3.50 or so a roll.  I got mine from Walmart but I think that craft stores and hardware stores also carry it.  I also got a cool rainbow pattern that I have to find a use for.  I'm thinking that I might try to buy a pair of shoes and decorate them with duck tape for a friend of ours who recently moved away as a nice surprise mail gift. 

One of the other things I like about this project is that you can make the purse as big or as small as you want to.  There is no set size in the instructions.  The purse is as big or as small as the piece of fabric you decide to use for it.

Start by cutting your piece of fabric down to the size you want your purse to be.  You will be folding the piece in half once you have your tape on it so it will really turn out to be about half the size of the piece of fabric you cut.  Lay it down face down on the table.

 

Start taping your fabric down to the table in the pattern that you want to appear on your purse.  I decided to do horizontal stripes but you could also do diagonal or vertical if you prefer.  Make sure the tape strips overlap each other and the table.  Don't worry if the tape strips don't all end in the same spot.

Peel the tape off the table and flip the whole thing over.

Cut around the edges down to the fabric.  This is what mine looked like when I was done:

Fold it in half and tape up the sides with the color of your choice.

The next step is to fold in the bottom corners of the purse to make it stand up and then tape up the inside sides and across the bottom of your purse.  There is a good picture of this on All Things Thrifty so you can see how to do the bottom corners.

Then tape around the entire top of the bag.  I then cut two strips out of my leftover fabric and taped along each side of them and taped them to the inside top of the bag for straps.