Duct tape gives artists and crafters a whole new medium to use for their creative projects.

Ellie Schiedermayer is the author of “Got Tape? Roll Out the Fun With Duct Tape!” (Krause Publications, $7.95 paperback). One of her ideas is to make a duct tape wallet. It’s easy:

Just make a basic sheet of four 7-inch long strips of duct tape. Place the first one in front of you, sticky side up. Overlap the strips a little on top of each other.

Next, repeat that process by putting four strips, sticky-side down, across the first four strips. After trimming the excess off of the edges, you end up with a duct tape piece of fabric. Just fold it in half and tape up the horizontal sides with a 4-inch piece of tape. After taping one side, it’s important to fold it in the center before you tape the other side in order to prevent bulging.

Another of Schiedermayer’s projects is a duct tape bracelet. Fold a long piece of duct tape in half — sticky-to-sticky. Cut out curvy zigzags of different colors of tape and interlock them by wrapping them around each other. The clasp is just a small piece of tape.

Schiedermayer offers some tips for using duct tape:

Use special Teflon-coated scissors so adhesive won’t build up as much on them.

Use the smoothest duct tape you can find so your projects will look better.

Decorate your project with paint pens, permanent markers and stickers, all of which work well on the slick coating.

If you want to get really creative, says Schiedermayer, you can do what a student from the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning did. He turned a ratty old couch he found in the garbage into a design statement by using different colors and some creativity. It just took two hours and eight rolls of duct tape to redo this couch.

(Tip: When covering furniture, it’s important to overlap each strip of tape so that it will hold when you sit on it. Cheers.)