The Days Are Long

The dog days of summer are upon us. Gone is the magic of school letting out, the first splash in the pool, and cool bite of a popsicle; we are now firmly in boredom territory. It’s time to get creative. So for today I’m giving you a real dog day project, using not much more than a little cardboard, some Scotch® Duct Tape, and a couple of old toy cars. I promise you hours of amusement and hands on fun. And wouldn’t you know it, before we started construction on the new deck, we made a little movie!



For this project we used:

A large cardboard box, cut into 5” wide strips
Scotch® Chalkboard Tape 
Scotch® Dry Erase Tape
Scotch® Tangerine Duct Tape and Green Apple Duct Tape
Scotch® Moving and Storage Packaging Tape
Scissors/ Box Cutter 
A piece of white chalk
A dry erase pen
Some string
2 bamboo skewers (or straws)
Small toy racing cars

We built the race tracks by cutting 5” wide strips of cardboard and taping them together with a little packaging tape. You can do this using scissors, but it is easier and faster with a box cutter(adults only!).

Folding the side of the track at about 1” in on either side provided enough of a lip to keep the cars on the track. To make the black track, we used Scotch® Chalkboard Tape. We secured the tape to the end of the track and one person pulled the backing from the tape while the other smoothed it along the cardboard. It was very easy.

Then Jasper hand drew the dash lines using white chalk. The Scotch® Chalkboard Tape was easy to wipe off when he wanted to fix some of the dashes. I made a little grandstand with a score-keeper that also acted as a way to stop the cars at the end of the race. The marquees are made using Scotch® Dry Erase Tape, and we used a dry erase pen to tick off the winner of each heat. It was easy to wipe away when they wanted to start the game over. To make the grandstand I folded a 5”x 24” strip of cardboard into a rectangle and secured it with a packaging tape. I cut 5” strips of Scotch® Colors Duct Tape to create a little underlay frame for the strips of Scotch® Dry Erase Tape for the marquee. I topped the stand with some flags made from Scotch® Colored Duct Tapes secured to a piece of twine, tied to a couple of skewers and taped to the inside of the box.

The boys hadn’t played with their old cars in months, but they were out on the track all day. At one point they took the game apart and made one long track and fashioned a tunnel out of another box and invented a whole narrative about their car world. They didn’t once mention how “bored” they were. A dog day success!

Want to see what else you can make with Scotch Colors and Patterns Duct Tape? Check out their Scotch® Duct Tape Pinterest Boards , Scotch® Duct Tape Facebook , and Scotch® Duct Tape Twitter pages for more project inspiration. 

I am proud to be a 3M- sponsored blogger, and, as part of my responsibilities, I get the opportunity to evaluate products from Scotch® Duct Tape. Opinions are my own and additional product used in the project were selected by me.