Freebie Friday: Personalized Labels

So I was privileged to be a guest poster on Meremade for her back to school month, which is still going on so head on over and get some more great ideas! Here is my contribution:

 I may have a small obsession with labels :) But when it comes to school supplies, can you really have too many labels? I don't think so either, especially fun printed and personalized-for-you labels.


Today that's what I'm sharing--some free printable Personalized Labels. The beauty of these downloadable labels is you only have to type in the name once and it fills out all the labels on the page! So nifty! (Or annoying if you wanted them all to be different . . . alas).  I say some because there are a few color choices for you to choose from. Color is important, right?

Okay, so the options are (click to download):

• RAINBOW with BLACK writing
• GREEN with BLACK writing
• GREY with TEAL writing
• GREY with HOT PINK writing
• MUSTARD with GREY writing

They all have the same font with light grey outlines around them. Those are the cutting guidlines. If you have a paper cutter you will be happy :) If not it won't be too bad!

So my mini tutorial is simple:

What you'll need:


Printer
Printer Paper
Scissors
paper cutter (optional)
Packaging Tape

Stuff to label---lots of it!


1. Download the Labels of your choice. Open them up in adobe reader and click on a yellow box inside one of the labels. Type in the name of your choice. Push enter and watch as all the labels are magically filled in for you! Print out on plain old regular printer paper (don't worry the yellow highlights won't print).

2. Cut out with scissors or a paper cutter. Even if using a paper cutter you may need to cut a little bit with scissors since some of the lines don't go straight through from one edge of the paper to the other.

3.  Pull out the packaging Tape and get taping!  I cut my tape with scissors so it would have smooth edges instead of the jagged ones made by an included cutter.

4. Make sure the packaging tape goes over on all edges. We don't want any water getting underneath because you probably printed on an ink jet printer and they bleed if water touches them (which is a good reason not to print on the letter size sticker paper--kudos for being cheap).

5. The flag labels are the ones with the small writing on both ends. I put them on my scissors.  I used a peice of double stick tape to stick the two flags together as well as the packaging tape on the outside (I didn't bother to do that with the flat ones). It's also a little bit tricky to get the tape through the scissor handle without getting it stuck. But once you do, CAREFULLY fold the pointy tips together first and then stick the rest of the tape down towards the handle. I had to clip the tape at the handle to make it fit a bit better, but it's really up to you.

If you are more into practical stuff  than fun flags, I might just tape a little label onto the side of the scissors . . . if you're boring (have I discouraged you enough yet, hee hee!)

6. For the crayons I didn't want huge pieces of packaging tape on my crayons so I cut a piece of tape the width of my tiny labels and then cut that in thirds and used all three pieces for three different crayons.

Anyway,  you get the idea. Not too tricky. Now all your stuff has pretty personalized labels that were fairly fast, and hopefully super cheap and everything is so organized right? Hah. Good luck finding the time to do it!


Happy labeling!

Guest posting on Meremade today!

Hey, head on over to Meremade and her awesome Back to School Month. I'm guest posting today!! I have some cool free labels for you!

enjoy!

Freebie Friday: Desk Labels

So I really wanted to do a fun Mother's Day printable but truth be told my brain is shot. The little sweetie is still waking up 2-5 times a night and my thinker just isn't thinking. I had no fun ideas. I did finally come up with a fun idea for the buddy to make--but it's not a printable. I'm going to have him paint on fabric and make it into a potholder. I'm sure it's been done before, but he'll like it. Hopefully the grandma's will like it, and if you like it you should do it too! I'll try to post a little tutorial if we get it done sooner than later. (With my zombie-like brain I make no promises).

Back to today's freebie: desk labels. 
I scored this awesome white desk off the side of the road a couple weeks ago and decided to move all my desk supplies out of the kitchen. hooray! But there wasn't really room for the plastic drawers I had them in so I pulled out some pickle jars--the honey hates that I save all our pickle jars and stash them in spare cupboard corners, but they do come in handy (and he does love that I didn't buy new jars). So they fit on the little edge at the top perfectly. But they kinda looked hodge podgey. They needed labels! I printed these on PAPER not cardstock and ran them through my Xyron machine with permanent adhesive in it (sticker making stuff). If you don't have one you could spray adhesive the back, use double stick tape, or print on adhesive backed label type paper. Either way the worst part is cutting them out by hand, and that's really not too bad. If you don't want to deal with the curves just cut them out square :)

Yep, the markers have a lid on them . . . the buddy is good about being safe with scissors but the lure of sharpie markers knows no bounds!

enjoy!

Freebie Friday: Page Planner

I used to make lists, lists, and more lists. I still do, but not as many. All those lists started weighing me down and I started to feel like I was suffocating under them. So I stopped. But then I was forgetting things, and not being as productive, and kind of floating around lost. I didn't want to go back to the lists and endless lists though. Seriously. What to do.  I needed something to give me a week "planner" at a time, but with my specific needs. I didn't want a real planner-too bulky yet not organized enough. I tried a 3 ring binder-yet again too bulky. Small notebooks? Not organized enough-too many pages to go through-where did I write that down? The things is I needed something portable-to take with me on the go-but also fast-my phone takes too much time (although if I weren't so visual it might be a good option). I also needed something with everything for at least a week on it. All the plans so I don't have random scraps of paper all over with blog posts lists and new recipe ideas. This was my solution: A one page weekly planner that I can fold up for on the go, but cram everything into and have an overview of the week plus my menu, shopping list, goals, and time with the buddy all lumped together. Kind of still lists, but not as hodge podged, and I don't write down "should do" things only "going to do" things.

click on picture for larger image.

Two caviats to this though-I'm very visual and I'm kind of a fly by the seat of my pants sort of girl, so this is trying to give me a little order-most of you are probably way ahead of me on this one. The other is I like to write small-as in 1/8 inch small. So this works for me. I've made it into a two page format for those of you who don't like using a magnifying glass to decipher your "not" lists.

Click here for the ONE page planner (my printer has a no-print margin on the bottom hence the run off on the right--still works for my needs though).

Click here for the TWO page planner