Duct Tape Messenger Bag + Hardware

Step 2 Understand the Plan

Duct tape is frustrating to manipulate in long lengths. You can easily degrade the quality of the bag--if not completely ruin your work--if you mess up even once. Therefore I highly suggest you understand the plan of action before starting. Of course you can skip through the steps and learn that way, but I have them condensed conveniently on this one page.

Simply, we will build layers of tape sheets that will form a flat shell which we will fold into a useful, bag-like shape.

The areas that comprise the panels of the bag are marked on the first picture. The outside border serves as an interface between the panels and also helps make a clean edge when finishing.

The second picture shows the layers we will be making. Although 3 are shown, there will be 5 in this tutorial. The other two are permutations on the other 3 and optional, though recommended.

Notice how layer 2 is only 10 widths wide rather than 11 widths wide for layer 1? This is how we get the border on the left and right sides of the sheet--layer 2 is offset by .94in on either side.

It seems simple.. and it is! In practice, though, there are annoying bits due to the nature of sticky back tape.

Now that you understand the project completely, we can proceed...