During my random Internet surfing one day, I came across List Girl’s post about printing your own decorative tape. We’ve all seen washi tape make a rampage on the crafting scene and they ARE oh-so cute indeed! Just not so affordable, especially if you want ALL colors and patterns. But when I saw the post, my DIY spirit had to give it a try. The mailing label stickers are a nice size, if you just want snippets for decorative purposes.

DIGITAL
First, I tried printing out some of my own digital patterns onto a sheet of mailing label stickers. Pretty easy to do and it’s cool to be able to print custom or intricate designs. However, printer ink can be costly and I was running out of ink – probably shouldn’t have printed out a whole page!

PAINT, INK, SPRAY
So then I decided to try paint for bolder color. I mixed in a lot of water with my acrylic paint and just spread it over the sticker sheet. This is probably the cheaper way to go for an entire sheet of bright color 😛 Of course, you can use inks and spray mists to create different background effects.

GLUE
I looked up some other tutorials online and realized that I could use my double stick tape, which works for creating a longer strip of design. It’s easy to glue on patterned papers. Turns out you can do this with masking tape as well, but the double stick tape makes it a super fast process.

STAMP
Then I thought to use my rubber stamps to decorate some of the painted paper. Even stamping on white sticker labels created a nice design, especially when using tape on darker papers.

MIX IT UP
My experimentations made me realize that we can use a combination of techniques to create the final design. Paint, inks and sprays are really good for creating the base color. Or you can print an intricate design or glue on materials like book paper or fabric.

Stamping or printing on top of your foundation can add more patterns and certain repeat motifs for your designs. I also tried drawing on lines with gel pens.

For little snippets of cute tape, the DIY version is actually pretty sweet looking! I also used my decorative scissors to cut the edges instead of the regular tearing method, but realized that the tearing of the tape is what makes it look more like tape. Check out all the versions I made…

If you are looking for more ideas, I’ve found some lovely sites to check out…
– TapeSwell, a whole blog about what to use your decorative tape for
Using double-sided tape
– Use masking tape Youtube video

I’m sure there are many other ways to hack your way into pretty tape kingdom, so please feel free share in the comments below. Hope you have fun making some deco tape today. I have to say it’s pretty addictive. Enjoy!