Mad for Plaid

On a visit to Target, I was drawn to this plaid Duck Tape:

There were other colors and styles like animal prints ( and even themes like Hello Kitty) which kind of got me thinking about the craftier side of duct tape.  I remember a while back seeing posts about kids who went to their proms in duct taped outfits and currently, Duck Tape even has contests for it.  So when I got these boots on a trip to the Goodwill while visiting my mom, I realized I had a project.  They were the perfect candidate as some of the original pleather was scratched off in places:

And they ended up like this.

Interested?

I googled around and came across great posts about such a project here, here, and this great tutorial by Crafting in the Rain here.  Anyhoo, I ran into one major issue: matching the plaid exactly was not possible due to the way the pattern is printed on the tape.  So I focused on syncing the broad purple lines as much as possible:

As I was using a pair of somewhat dull scissors of my mom's that got stickier as I cut more tape, I found it advantageous to work as much length as possible to prevent tearing the tape (due to cutting with dull scissors) and pattern consistency: 

Be sure to press the tape into all the wrinkles of the boot by pressing outward with a hand inside the boot and pressing the tape into the wrinkles with the other hand on the outside of the boot.  When I was able to lay the pieces evenly next to each other, it didn't look too bad:

The hard part was hitting the curves, where the tape can't just be laid side by side in rows:

So I would fill the blank spaces with shorter pieces of duct tape trying to sync the purple lines as best I could.  I also made a boundary near the bottom edge with little pieces of duct tape so that when I cut the bottom edges of the long strips roughly with the scissors, the boundary would keep the bottom edge looking clean:

Unfortunately it was really challenging to match even just the purple lines around the bottom curve, so the bottom part of the boot definitely has a more collagy look.

Well they may not be perfect, but they lend a fun accent to simple jeans, don't you think?

This project took less about two hours so I give a thumbs up on the fun plaid Duck Tape for this upcycled boot project.  Anybody else have ideas of what I else should duct tape?