How To Make Your Own Velcro Staff

A couple years ago, I made my own Velcro staff to use with my students. It's come in handy for many activities, from identifying landmark notes to melodic transcription. It is sturdy, lightweight, and sits easily on my upright piano's music stand. I've posted instructions below on how to make your own. If you do, please let me know how it turns out!

Add Velcro adhesive to music symbols, seasonal stickers, felt or foam dots... the possibilities are endless!

You'll Need:

• One piece of 20x30" black foam board; it should be 3/16" thick, and ideally have faint gray grid lines
  
• 35' of 1 1/4" white adhesive Velcro tape (I used 7 packages of Velcro Removable Hanging Strip; each package comes with a 5' x 1 1/4" removable adhesive Velcro hanging strip and twelve adhesive 7/8" Velcro circles)
• One 20x30" poster frame
• Music symbols printed to size (I used Trend Brand Music Symbols Classic Accents® Variety Pack)

Directions:

1. Cut fourteen 30" x 1 1/4" strips of adhesive Velcro tape. If you use the 5' Velcro Removable Hanging Strips, you can simply cut them each in half.
2. Adhere the first strip to the top of the foam board, making it completely flush with the long, 30" edge. Leave a 1/4" gap before placing the second strip below. This gap forms the first staff line. It is very important that each staff line have an exactly 1/4" gap. Continue adding strips until the top staff complete. Create the middle of the grand staff by placing four strips flush against each other. Create the bottom staff by leaving gaps again for the remaining 5 lines. If you've measured your gaps correctly, the final strip will end up flush with the bottom of the foam board. The nice thing about the Velcro Removable Hanging Strips is that they are repositionable, so if one isn't lined up quite right, you can just remove and reposition it. Faint gray grid lines on the black foam board help too. You could also draw lines with pencil if your foam board doesn't come with grid lines. 
3. Once all your strips are placed, take the four plastic frame edges off of a 20x30" poster frame and slide them over the edges of your foam board. This gives the board stability and keeps the adhesive strip edges from peeling off.
4. The Trend Brand music symbols (pictured above) fit perfectly on this staff. The only exception is that the treble and bass clefs are a bit too small, as you can see. However, you can always draw larger ones, and/or download and print larger clef images. I haven't had a chance to make this "upgrade" yet! I did laminate the music symbols to give them durability. Then I placed the adhesive Velcro circles that came with the Hanging Strips on the back of the laminated music symbols, as well as on stickers (with the peel still on) and felt dots (with cardboard backing). 
5. It's easy to make bar lines and ledger lines by cutting thin strips of basic black Velcro, available in the hardware section of many stores.