I am so sorry that it has taken me so long to finally get this tutorial up. February crawled by with my family getting the flu just after my son’s party and then one cold after another all month long. I have no idea what happened with March! Other than I have been playing catch up and doing this and that at my boys’ school. Anyway, enough with the excuses, it is time to get this tut on! We also managed to make it to the Renaissance festival with Rebecca and the rest of the family. It was fun watching all the cousins sword fight with their new wooden swords (thanks Papa). By the way this kind of belt would work well for holding a sword as well. ;)
You might remember back in February I had an awesome Lego Agents party for my 8 year old. One of the favors was a duct tape belt to hold their shooters and an ammo canister. GO HERE TO SEE PART ONE OF THE PARTY. GO HERE TO SEE PART TWO OF THE PARTY WITH THE BELTS I promised a reader that I would post a tutorial.
First you want to measure around the child’s waist. Make sure it fits a little loose and over laps about 3 inches in the back. This is something you want to try to make ahead of time. If you are unsure of how big the party guests are then you can make up a bunch of belts in various lengths. The day of the party you can trim them down and add the Velcro closures.
This step is fairly simple. Just fold up the bottom edge. It can be a little tricky when doing this with a long belt. Start at one end and fold over about 5 inches at a time. This will be the finished width of the belt so don’t fold over too much. About a half inch or so.
For this step I highly recommend that you leave the second layer of tape on the roll and unroll as you need more. You will be lining up the bottom edge with the folded edge of the first piece of tape. By unrolling the tape as you go you will have less trouble with the tape sticking where you don’t want it to.
Now flip it over and fold down the top edge. This is your belt.
This is the tab or strap (whatever you want to call it) that will hold the shooter on one side and another for the ammo canister (film canister) on the other side. Eye ball the length you need to go around the canister or shooter plus the width of the Velcro. You can always trim it down if you need to. Fold over the tape on itself (this is the part that will go around the shooter.
If you were going to make this for a sword, I would just fold the tape in half at this point. Make it long enough so that the sword will slip through plus extra on both sides to tape down. Then trim it to the width of the belt. Use a piece of tape on either side as I did in step 7. I would suggest laying your sword between the belt and the strap to make sure you have left enough room to get the sword in and out of the belt.
Just snip the strap so that you can fold over the exposed tape.
Cut another piece of duct tape and wrap it around the taped end of the strap to help it hold the weight of the shooter.
Trip the edges of the strap to match the width of the belt.
A little not about the Velcro. I had bought some “Scotts” brand hook and loop with permanent adhesive on the back. I found that it didn’t stick to the duct tape as well as the “Velcro” brand adhesive backed Velcro that I used in the first two I made for my son. There was at least one belt that I ended up using staples to keep the Scotts from coming off again. Just make sure the staple ends are on the Velcro side of the belt so the kids don’t get scratched.
The Scotts brand is in the photo above and the Velcro brand is in the picture below. For some reason the loop portion of the Velcro comes in dots and the hook portion comes in a strip from the same package.
Here is the closure in the back with about 2-3 inches of Velcro overlap. This worked out well because when you add the weight of the shooters to the belt it will weigh it down quite a bit. Some of the kids needed us to adjust their belts a little tighter. Also this will allow for them to wear these over other layers of clothing depending on the time of year.
Katrina
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