How often have you said to yourself, “Here is a new way to do this job. Why haven’t I tried this before?”

I knew what my new Passion of the Week was when I started buying up adhesive tape runners. I mean, how long can you suffer using sheets of glue dots when the plastic sheets either tear too easily, or don’t seem to tear at all. And, when the glue dots would rather stick to your fingers than to your craft paper.

There was a fairly easy answer to “Which of the several brands of adhesive tape runners should I buy?”

Most of them.

Yes, the month has just begun, and I have already depleted almost one-third of my monthly hobby budget. But who cares, since I discovered the excitement of experimenting with the greatest hobby adhesive since Mucilage liquid glue.

Now I have four types of tape/glue runners: permanent adhesive, removable adhesive, dots adhesive (which starts out removable and becomes permanent), and mini dots adhesive (an actual path of little glue dots).

I even found a heart-shaped adhesive runner for my granddaughter to use, in case her stickers no longer self-stick.

Not only can I apply tape runners to my pop-up card pages to professionally seal them, I can apply them to the one-third-inch-wide plastic strips I use to hold my pop-up pictures.

Because I need to frequently re-engineer my plastic-strip-mounted pop-out pictures to satisfy my pop-up preferences, I will mostly use the dots adhesive tape runner, which will allow repositioning, before turning permanent. It’s a lot of fun and, besides, the tape runner refills are much cheaper than the original dispenser.

I just applied a vertical removable strip of tape runner to the left side of my Mac. It’s an instant bulletin board, obviating the need for Post-it notes. My favorite gel pen now has a place of honor on the Mac’s right side, thanks to a line of mini glue dots.

Tape adhesive runners, zip ties, and tear-by-hand packaging tape: gifts from heaven.

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen@hotmail.com