Craft Gossip

Independent craft blog since 2007

Glow-In-The-Dark Duct Tape Safety Slapbands

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I was so excited when 3M offered me the opportunity to come up with a simple craft for Halloween using their duct tape! I automatically was drawn to their glow-in-the-dark duct tape options and began thinking of ideas.

Being a mom of 4, the night of Halloween can make a mom nervous with kids running all over the place in the dark. I thought it might be nice to use the glow in the dark duct tape to make fun slap bracelets as an added layer of protection and safety.  This would also make a fun and simple Halloween party craft!

3M Offers three different types of Glow In The Dark Halloween Duct Tapes:

Batman, Spiders and Spiderwebs, and Solid Glow

To make these super simple Slapbands you will need:

3M also included an amazing pair of their scissors and I must say, they work wonderfully to cut through duct tape!

Instructions:

1.Grab your slap bands and peel off the layer of material they have included on the band. The cheap ones are barely glued on and come off easily. You will be left with a piece of thin metal.

Open the slapbands

3M duct tape slap bands

2. Measure out a piece of duct tape and lay the rounded side on top. This will be your bottom layer of the bracelet where you can have seams. Its important to make sure you do this side first as to not have your duct tape edges on the top.

3M-Duct Tape Slapbands-9

3M Duct Tape

3M Duct Tape Measure

3. Wrap the duct tape around, or if it is a skinny duct tape, you can just leave it flat and create a rectangle bracelet. The choice is yours. I did it both ways and they all work out fine!

4. Cut a second piece and carefully place the duct tape directly on top of your bottom piece so you don’t have any overlapping sticky edges.

Overlay duct tape

5. If you want a rounded end slap band, here is where you will cut your edges to match up with the end of the slap band. Otherwise, just leave a square edge.

6. If you have older kids and they want a more edgy cool look, you can double up your slap bands and use thick duct tape…my oldest daughter loved the look of it!

Slapbands

7. Now you are ready to practice slapping the band on your arm, or your bicycle, or your trick-or-treat pumpkin or bag…or a ghost!

Slapband on bike

Duct Tape Head on Figure

My kids had a great time helping me with this project and can’t wait till Halloween!

Thank you to 3M for providing such awesome materials for this craft!

SideNote: The all white glow duct tape glows the best! But the Batman and Spider Duct Tape is way cooler!!

This project was written by Kristen Stephens – our ex-lesson plans editor.

colors & patterns, duct tape, tape , scotch duct tape, scotch tape

This post is a collaboration with Scotch® Color & Pattern Duct Tape, but words and opinions are my own.

Comments

  1. I love this craft! I write a column for our local paper in Chicago and would love to include it in my halloween column. Would that be ok? I would credit your site and link back and credit the designer ~ please just let me know as Id also love a high res photo to include as well my deadline is this wednesday 10/9/12 at 10 AM. Thanks so much!

Have you read?

Cross Stitch Forum Asks for Proof Stitches Aren’t AI

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns. 

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated. 

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches. 

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look. 

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI. 

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in. 

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]