The NHS Transition Tape Map - Failures

Electrical tape

Although sticky, the tape struggled to adhere to the brick, and where the tape got stretched (as it does when pulling some off of the roll) and then stuck down, it was then trying to slowly shrink its way back to normal sized. The result being the tape blowing off of the brick completely and wadded itself into a big blob. This meant I was now had to replace dark turquoise/green colour, and the royal blue. Thankfully, when I had sourced a baby blue and pink equivalent in Duck Masking Tape at £8 for 24m, they also had a dark green colour that I decided to pick up as a just in case that I could return if necessary. So I replaced the green electrical tape with this, and the blue electrical tape with the blue duct tape that came in the variety pack. It is fairly similar to the blue used for the Referral line, but it is still a shade darker so I deemed it different enough. Hopefully I may be able to source a blue that is a bit darker, but still not so dark as to be mistaken for the navy.

Washi Tape

As I detailed in my Sourcing Tape post, I could not find duct/electrical/masking tape in burgundy, pale orange, pale turquoise or lilac, and so I was forced to buy these expensive little washi tape rolls. Unfortunately this wasn’t as close to masking tape as I was expecting, and would probably only to clean paper/card for crafting purposes. It started to fly up from the brick immediately, and I had to use Sellotape to attempt to stick it down. However, the Sellotape did not stick much better and also reflected really brightly in the camera shot of the map. So I cut up lots of thin strips of white duct tape with the idea of making steri-strips down the lines, that would later be covered up by the station circles.

Colour Adjustments

However, I had not registered just how thin the washi tape actually was and the consequences of this - to make the lines the same width as the rest, I then had to use 5 strips of the tape. Where I knew the measurements necessary to create each line, I had bought enough tape to create the line based on only needing 1 line width. This meant that where the original map used a dark turquoise for the Soprano Line from the Voice Station, and a light turquoise for the Masculinizing Line from the Operation Station, I had to switch the colours.

The Soprano Line required 1.8m of tape, but the Masculinizing Line required 7.3m - of which there was enough washi tape to be able to create the line once over, not 5 times over. The dark green Duck Masking Tape that replaced the electrical tape I had used for the Soprano line originally was 24m in length, meaning that after layering 3 x 20mm strips of 1.8m to create the 48-50mm width of the other duct tapes, I had approximately 18m left, which would allow me to create the Masculinizing line at a width of 40mm - slightly smaller than the others, but not noticeably. So I pulled up the Soprano line, and replaced it with the light turquoise washi tape.

Masking Tape

Although masking tape did adhere to the ground well, it was not to the same level as the duct tape. The process of making the lines with it was also significantly longer, where I had to peel it from the roll carefully so as to not rip the tape and be laying it as one long, intact line. Due to the width of the rolls being 20mm, I had to layer 3 strips of it to create the 48-50mm width of the other lines, using the majority of the rolls of the baby blue and baby pink colours, and 2 strips of the dark green due to length limitations after having already created the Soprano line using 3 strips.