How to Make a Duct Tape Can Cover

Level: Die-hard Duck-o

This project is obviously not for the true casual taper but the truly obsessed! This all started back when I was in Juneau, new to a fantabulous apartment with a terrific kitchen layout with only one major flaw: not nearly the cupboard space a gal like me needed to properly store food for seven! So, because I am just that cool, I decided to cover my cans with duct tape ‘cozies’ so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed when my friends came over for classes. Of course, by then my duct tape and supplies had totally taken over my kitchen and my food got relocated to my bedroom, so it turned out to be a moot point. So why am I now making them again, even though I have a studi-o and no good excuse, you ask? Because I can, that’s why.

Okay, so I have full intentions of doing enough of these to completely fill my cupboard, but I’m going to start with a #10 can size tomato sauce. Mostly because its big, and therefore I can add some fun detail, like my initials as a logo, for example.

Lay out 5 strips of red, long enough to go around the circumference of your can. To figure that, I carefully ripped my label off my can and added a few inches. Finish size for my can was 20″ so I pulled my strips at about 24″.

Next, mark out and draw your label. Keep in mind that only about 7″ is actually visible at any given time, so make sure you stay well within that as you sketch it out. I used a pineapple can to give me the basic size and shape for my tomato, then flattened it a tad and added a basic stem. I was extra careful about the background label shape as I knew that would be the first thing to cut out. Not too much detail; all of this will be redrawn as the layers are completed.

Now cut out the background for the logo, but hold onto the red cut-out for future reference. I ended up with a total of 3 layers on my logo: gray, white, and tan, with tan as my background color.

Fill in the rest of your details , this time the way you actually want it to look. There is a more precise, and therefore more professional looking, method you can use, but it requires a printer and a computer, of which I have neither. I will show that technique in a future post when I have the tools to do a YouTube videos again. Maybe for Halloween costumes or some other such awesome project.

Meanwhile, back to the project at hand, cut out and back the tomato. Don’t cut out the stem, though. I backed it with dark brown because, oh yeah, my label is red and so is my tomato! You also need to cut ‘phase 1′ of the lettering; begin with the very outside lines.

Continue working on the details, working from the outside in, redrawing lines as needed, until complete.

Cut label at 20″. Peel up from the mat and add magnets on all 4 corners. Cover back with gray and front with clear to protect your hard work. Wrap label around can, add you scraps to duck-o ball and you done.

Happy obsessing Duck-os!