During the 90s I was in a wedding-reception band. At one job, our bass player announced that he had forgotten his guitar strap. We always had gaffer tape with us, a black close relative of duct tape. I laid a guitar-strap-length strip on the floor, adhesive up, and then laid another strip onto it, adhesive-to-adhesive. I cut a slit at each end to accommodate the strap buttons on his bass, and he had a strap that lasted through a four-hour gig.
Some ridiculous price for a plastic wallet to carry the magnetic cards for ski-lifts. One roll of duct tape and presto: two cards taped to the inside sleeve of our jackets, at a fraction of the cost.
I accidentally broke the main stalk off my masive tomato plant…duct taped it, and it was good as new and produced tons of tomatos!!! 
A couple years ago, one of my dogs broke a nail off in the middle of winter, snow on the ground, and the vet wanted to keep it dry. So… I put the ointment on, wrapped it in gauze, put a toddler’s sock over the paw then wrapped the whole thing in duct tape. It worked wonderfully and my vet was quite impressed with it!
Why should duct tape be wasted on old, broken stuff?
I put duct tape all over my brand-new mower - in particular, the places where various knobs were holding it together. That’s because those very same knobs kept vibrating off of its predecessor and getting lost in the lawn (or worse, falling off and then promptly getting run over by the lawn mower).
It’s been over a year and I haven’t lost a knob yet…
Me too. A large and very stubborn plantar’s wart. It made it smaller at least, but the duck tape would never stay on long enough to do much good. I tried nail polish a couple years later and the wart disappeared in a couple weeks.
related: we have a three foot wide roll of duct tape we have no idea what to do with.
eta: actually I do have something a bit wierd I’m using duct tape for. I’m using a roll of it right now as a foot rest.
I had to duct tape power extension strips to my legs, once.
Not strange, perhaps, but the arm of the office chair I’m sitting in while I type these words is made of plastic and broke off one day. I just duct taped that sucker right back on, it’s been about a year, and works as well as it ever did.
Had to…
Also, if you search Youtube for ‘duct tape’, you get links to all kinds of projects…including that rose!
I’m an art teacher so lots of stuff gets duct taped. My favorite was for an art hat project where the student formed a sort of spiky tentacled skull cap that ran down the wearer’s back along his spine. Nails, screws and broken glass were then poked through from the inside (more tape to hold them in place). Quite awesome.
Personally, I taped closed the cloth top on my car when some idjit slashed it in order to steal-- a lipstick. The top required multiple re-tapings (in different colors and patterns, natch) but the rain stayed out until I could afford to replace the top. I kind of miss all the colors, come to think of it.
I’ve done this, more than once, not to make a pattern, but to make a duct tape dummy to make SCA clothes on.
I was in a production of The Threepenny Opera, and the costume designer had constructed padded bodices for all the whores. As I was small-busted, there was a gap between my boobs and the bodice, so I used duct tape to create some awesome cleavage and push everything up to fill out the bodice. It looked great! I wouldn’t recommend it for long-term use, however, as removing duct tape from my skin every night for the run of the production did cause some issues.
I once made a golf bag out of Grey Tape, poster tubes, and an old towel.
The baby!
There are a million uses for duct tape. Here’s just one.
For a freshman year engineering project we had to make the “round peg in a square hole” air filter like they had to on Apollo 13. One of the materials they had was a roll of duct tape. We made the thing using only duct tape.
No personal story, but I do recall a *Doonesbury *strip where (Duke?) was babysitting or something and discussing his strategy. The last panel was someone asking his secret for good behavior in the kids.
“Duct tape. There’s not a child care problem in the world that can’t be solved with duct tape.”
Great answer.
Back when I was working oil fields, some of the rural living accomodations were less than modern. One in particular just had a bath and no shower. Being a shower kind of guy, I duct taped a garden hose to the tub fawcet and again to a clothes hanger hanging from the ceiling. You won’t see that on any remodeling show but it did manage to get me clean.
Thanks. I’m going to have to try making those bows.
:eek:
That reminds me - I once saw a custom boots booth at a craft fair. When I asked about the line of deflated looking duct tape boots hanging up in the back, the guy said that those were his patterns. When you ordered a pair, you stepped onto a thick piece of posterboard and he’d make a template of your footprint. Then he’d cut that out, have you put on tube socks and step on the footprint. He’d duct tape the sock completely, attaching it to the cutout, then cut the whole thing off and use it as a pattern for your boots.
And didn’t they also use a sock? And an empty toilet paper tube?..(Maybe that was a bong…)