This past week was the spring school holiday for our kids and I like to come up with different “theme” days for them.  Thursday was craft day and I was looking for inspiration for crafts and I found a few blogs talking about duct tape purses.  I have to admit I did not realise how popular this had become and the wide variety of duct tape that was on offer.  It’s a bit mind boggling!

I took my inspiration for my daughter’s purse from All Things Thrifty.  So off we went to the store to pick out what duct tape the kids wanted to use.

My daughter had an old shirt that didn’t fit anymore so it was perfect for this project.  I recommend using a tray as well for this.  And a good pair of scissors.  Sounds like a no-brainer but I grabbed our worst scissors and as we were doing this at a park with a picnic we ended up struggling a bit.  We’ll know better next time!

Cut out a piece of fabric that is the size you would like for the purse.  This will be folded in half to cover both sides of the purse.  Tape it down on the backside of the tray.

Take the chosen duct tape and cut to length you need and tape it down in the pattern you want on the fabric.  My daughter wanted horizontal stripes for her purse.

Trim the tape it is all even on the edges.  Remove from the tray and fold in half.  If you used good scissors the fabric would have been cut smoothly and you won’t have to worry about the tape sticking together.  I didn’t do that so there were some tricky moments!

Tape up the sides.  Here is the trickiest part of the whole thing.  The bottom corners need to be tucked in to square off the bottom and sides.  The outside and inside need to look like this:

Next tape up the bottom and inside seams to strengthen and finish off the edges.  Also, tape along the top to finish that edge.

My daughter chose to have fabric handles so we took the sleeves of the old shirt and cut them into strips.  Then we braided them and attached them with tape to the inside of the bag.

And before you know it you have a really cute bag!

For my son we did a little satchel that followed this from Craft-Create-Connect.  We used a sandwich ziploc bag for him as he just needed a small bag for Lego.  He was so excited they had Angry Birds!  🙂