About a month ago I gave up a Sunday to help my fiancé, Jacob, organize his fourth-grade classroom in Brooklyn. My job was to make signs, laminate kid drawings, and decorate the classroom door with the students’ chosen class name, “the Fire Dogs.” It was while doing this that I discovered magnet tape.
Judging by Jacob’s blasé response to my excitement and giddy questions about the stuff, I gathered that it’s a pretty common school supply among classroom teachers. And while I can’t share all the secrets from my school visit (Fire Dogs is not the actual class name, which I’ve been asked not to reveal), I do feel the world needs to know about this tape. After experiencing how easy it was to use, I started plotting all the things I would turn into magnets at home: love notes, abstract shapes cut out of construction paper to give our fridge more personality, pompoms, laminated photos of our dog, and of course magnetized versions of our favorite recipes cut from magazine pages or jotted down on index cards.
Magnet tape looks just like scotch tape but instead of simply being sticky, it’s made out of paper thin magnetic material with adhesive on the back. After using it that first day at school, I quickly looked it up online and bought a roll for my own personal use. I hate the look of a cluttered fridge with tons of mismatched clunky magnets, but with this, I just press a few centimeters of the tape to the back of photos or cards and plonk it onto the fridge for a neater, floating effect.
I recently realized that, like a lot of New York apartments, our front door is made of metal and therefore magnetic. Now that I have this tape I have started using the door as a place to display photos, notes, and a household monthly calendar. I’ve even been thinking about making my own giant set of magnetic letters so we can leave each other notes on the back of the door. And I am currently using it to stick hand drawn holiday decorations to the front of the door.
The tape is only strong enough to hold lightweight things like paper or card stock, but that’s plenty for me. Great art/office supplies don’t have to be multipurpose, they just have to do one thing really well and make you happy doing it. Now that my refrigerator and my apartment door are covered, I’m starting to think about how I can use the rest of my magnet tape to make custom holiday gifts for friends and family — maybe a set of magnetic animals for my little niece. But honestly it’s so satisfying to use, I might just buy a couple of rolls to drop in people’s stockings.
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