Handmade Custom Paper Tape

I’ve found a new obsession in paper tape. So in an effort to feed the need, I decided to simply make my own. It’s crazy easy, if you have the right materials and tools. This tutorial is for making peel-away backed tape. I ordered of 3M Positionable Mounting Adhesive roll from Amazon.com. This is the perfect stuff for creating your own tape. It is a bit costly at $40 per roll, but possibly you can split it with a friend or plan to make enough tape to gift or sell. There are other double-sided adhesive options you can look into that may cost less, however, the large roll allows for much longer sections of tape for spool rolling.

I found this sweet pattern-stripe gift wrap, Fairground Stripes, at the fabulous shop Sunnyside Cottage in Santa Rosa, CA. Stripes are fun, you can cut along them or across them, but any small patterned paper works great for making your own tape. I cut three identical sections to lay end to end along the roll of adhesive.

Once all three lengths of wrap patterns were laid out on the adhesive roll and burnished, I sliced between the patterns using an Xacto knife and straight-edge on my Martha Stewart Cutting Mat.With each strip cut, I wound the tape onto vintage wooden spools. You can trim away just a bit of the backing at one end to adhere the tape to the spool to keep the tape from slipping as you wind.You can also use a dense cardboard tube measured and cut into spools. The tube from your Saran Wrap will work great. I had some small tubes in my stash that I cut to the same width as some of my tape.Once wound, I used some thin silver threaded wire to hold the roll together. Floral wire would be good, too. The wire is easily moved when using the roll and repositioned to hold the remaining tape.You can see the adhesive on the back of the tape once the backing paper is pulled off. Although the adhesive product is referred to as repositionable, it does become permanent once used. I also made vintage wrapping paper tape.You can trim your tape with decorative edge punches and scissors.I made a few rolls of paper tape with vintage maps, ledger paper and an old train ticket roll.For even more custom tape, I printed my own designs to thin kraft paper from a roll I picked up at the flea market yesterday. To ease thinner paper into your printer, it’s good to adhere a standard sheet of paper to one end as a feeder sheet to be removed after printing. I cut my kraft paper to the page size of my graphics which was 8.5″ x 14″. I laid out each design three times with thin cutting guide lines. Once printed, I trimmed out all the rows and placed each design end to end on the adhesive roll and trimmed into tape.My graphics were simply alphabets, numbers and borders. You can also print to plain paper and create special event graphics, words and names.

All this tape will be so much fun to use for lots of projects- sealing stationery and gifts, making crafts, decorating things, gifting and more.

Note that when the tape unwinds from the spool that the decorative paper will split in sections at the seams where the paper pieces begin and end, though the backing remains one long piece. To keep tape from coming apart in those areas, you can laminate the entire connected sections of paper with one long piece of Clear Con-Tact shelf liner before slicing into rows of tape. This will also give the tape a sheener surface.

You can use this same tutorial for easily creating ribbon tape by laying rows of various ribbon tightly side by side and trimming between each.