Stretching my ears with tape. is it safe?

earlier today i decided to stretch my ears. some of my friends at school told me ( they have gauges too ) that if you don't want to go through the pain of strectching your ears, just wrap a little bit of tape around your current piercings. i have the common piercing ( 18g ) so i wrapped the earrings a little bit, put some vaseline on, soaked my ears in warm water and slowly insterted the now thicker piercings. they burned for abut ten minutes but that went away and i wanted to know if it is safe for me to leave these home-made gauges in my ears overnight.