Attaching Strips of Reflective Paper to a Kaleidoscope

Video Transcript

"Now that our strips are cut I'm going to tape them together. The way I do this is I take on strip in the middle and I have it face up and I take another strip to the right and I put it face down on top of it. Now I'll be able to take a piece of masking tape and run it all along the surface on the right side, taping the right side of the top piece, to the right side of the bottom piece. Then I fold it over and make sure that the tape, the masking tape, makes contact with both sides. Now the masking tape is just obviously going across the back. Because the masking tape was put on when they were lying right on top of each other, we see that after we turn it over that both strips are lying very close together, which is really the effect, really what we're looking for. Now to go ahead and get the third strip attached, we go ahead and do the same thing. We open up the two strips and we lay the third strip that's not yet attached, we lay it right on top and we apply the tape directly to the edge and we leave a little left over to that we can fold it around the back making sure that it's right next to running even with the strip that's on the bottom. Then we go ahead and fold the masking tape back and once we open up, we also see that it's put together nice and close with very little space, and if there is a little space all we have to do is just go ahead and peel off a little bit and then reapply it. The good thing about masking tape is that it won't rip the paper, once something is applied to it and you want to take it off. It won't tear anything. You can pretty much take something off the masking tape without worrying about ripping it. So here we see we have a little bit of a space. We just go ahead and peel it off almost to the end. Then we just go ahead and reattach it making it very, nice and close together. Then when we're done we'll have our three strips, and they'll be attached together with basically, no spaces in between but we'll have the folds there which is what we're looking for because, we have to fold it into that triangle shape that I mentioned before. So we're going to fold the ends up till they meet and then we're going to apply another piece of masking tape right across the top and that will hold the whole thing together and it will give us our triangle shape. So, we just take the masking tape, put it over one edge with a little bit hanging over. Then we bring it together with the opposite edge and we close it off by just folding the masking tape over the side. And now we see we have the triangular shape that we're looking for. The three sides, the three strips, meet each other creating the three facets of the inside of our kaleidoscope. And that's what we're looking for, because now everything is reflecting, every side is reflecting off of the other and that's going to create the effect that you have when you look inside a kaleidoscope. So I've shown you now how to attach the strips of reflective paper and create the inside of the kaleidoscope."