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How to Make an iTampon
Since Apple’s release of the iPad on Wednesday, the blogosphere has been a-Twitter with jokes about the name’s inevitable association with feminine hygiene products. But to us, it’s no joke. We fired up our glue guns and went to work in our product development labs. Now you can make your own very iTampon
and enjoy looking cool - two months before you can buy it in the stores.
Materials
- Tampax regular tampons (about 50)
- Newspaper
- Cardboard
- Spray paint (silver or gray)
- Acrylic paints (various colors)
- Utility knife
- Scissors
- Hot glue gun
- Paint brushes
- Silver metallic or gray pen (to match the spray paint)
Instructions
Cut a piece of cardboard to 9.5” x 7.5” to use as a base. Remove several tampons from their applicators. Pull open and press flat, and cut off the strings. Cut the tampons in half alongside the string and the stitching down the middle. Hot glue a border of half-tampons around the edge of the cardboard. Wrap the tampon lengthwise over the edge and glue on both sides of the cardboard base. To get the corners to be rounded, wrap a section of tampon around the corner, as opposed to having two tampon ends meet at the corner.
Unwrap and flatten another 18 or so tampons, and cut off the strings. Hot glue rows of tampons onto the back surface of the cardboard. They should be flush together and all of the surface should be covered.
Spray paint the tampon border and the back with silver or gray paint.
After the spray paint has dried, glue another row of half-tampons inside the silver border.
Paint the inner border with black acrylic paint. Make sure the cotton is completely covered, and paint around the sides of the tampons as well so no white is exposed.
After the black paint has dried, fill in the remaining surface area
by gluing in flattened tampons.
Begin painting your iTampon screen. We chose to go with the original background image design, which is a twilit sky, mountains, and water. Start with light shades as your base and add darker shades on top. When the background screen image is finished, allow it to dry completely.
Cut a stencil for the application icons. Ours is a rounded-off square about .75” across.
Use the stencil to paint in the background colors of your app icons. When the icon backgrounds are dry, paint in the details. It can be hard to paint straight lines and edges on the bumpy surface of the tampons, so take a step back for perspective and paint into the indentations if necessary to get the right effect and compensate for distortions.
Feel free to personalize your icons. We added a special tampon app.
Print out an Apple logo and iTampon lettering (the official Apple font is Podium Sans, but the Myriad font works as well). Paint with black paint if they need to be darker.
With a silver metallic pen, color around the lettering so it will match the background.
Hot glue the logo and lettering onto the back.
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