hi this is Abby from just a girl on her blog and today we are going to be talking about making
pretty labels in Microsoft Word if you have spent much time on my blog you know that I love to label
everything I love it when things are organized and labels help me do that a lot better even
even better if they're pretty so by the end of this tutorial you are going to be able to make
your own pretty labels using Microsoft Word so the first thing we're going to do is open up our
word document and in the Home tab here you're going to go over to the shape tab now I am on
a macbook pro so if you are using a pc or you have a different version of word than i do your
buttons might be in a slightly different place but they're all still there so you should might
have to look around a little bit but you should be able to find all the things that i'm referring
to in the tutorial today so i go to shape and we'll start with a basic circle pick the circle
shape and if i want to make a perfect circle one little trick that I like to do is I just hold down
the shift key while I click and drag and that'll make a perfect circle for me just like that now
I can go into my format tab and play around with the height I wanted to stay perfect I'll lock the
aspect ratio there and let's just make it three and a half inches by three and a half inches one
thing I always do with my shapes is I go into wrap text and I will choose in front of text this just
makes sure it's above everything else so sometimes weird things happen and shapes will like go flying
around the page but if you have it on in front of text that doesn't happen so the other thing
I do is word my version of word automatically puts a little drop shadow on all of my shapes
and I don't really like that so I take it off I go into effects shadow and choose no shadow so
we have our flat image then we can choose the fill color and the outline color of our shade
so we'll start with the outline go to line and we'll click in here and we'll just choose choose
this bright pink color that's already on now you can see it but it's not very thick so in order to
thicken it up we'll go back under the line and go to weight and you can choose any weight you
like I'm going to go with three-point and then it just is defined a little better so then for
my fill for the shape instead of the blue I'm just going to go with a crisp clean white choose weight
and so now I have my outline circle to make it a little more interesting I like to add a second
layer here so I'll go back over to my shapes I will pick another circle again holding down the
shift key I'll click and drag and let it go and pop over to my format tab again now I want this
one to be a little smaller than my other one so if my other one was three and a half inches
we'll make this one three and a quarter inches that makes it smaller now in order to line it up
with my other circle I'm going to hold down the command key or it would be the control key on
a PC and this first layer is already selected as I hold down my command key I'll click the second
layer so that they are both selected at the same time and then I can go up here to my a line tool
and click align Center and then align middle and then they are perfectly lined up so easy going to
my top circle that I just created we'll choose wrap text and we'll pick in front of text again
we will also take a shadow off again and then this one will also give a white fill and for our line
we will make it right orange this time and again we'll thicken it up so it's a little more defined
which is 3.now maybe instead of a solid circle on the inside we wanted to do something a little more
interesting with it so if you go under a line and go down to - you have all these different
options you can make little circles or a dashed line or dashes and dot's whatever you think looks
good we'll do dashes and dot's here and it just gives it a little different effect now we just
need to add our words so we'll go up to text box click that drag a text box in here and let's say
this particularly label is going in our pantry so we'll say it's for sugar and that's really small
so we'll go up here and we'll change our fonts I know a font that I like is called a clicker
script we'll make it a little bigger bigger than that we'll go up to 48 and then we'll
make it a color we'll go with C an aqua here that's I'm pretty cute we'll drag our text box
to the size we need it and again we'll do that same little trick that we did before to select
everything push the command key on a Mac or the control key on a PC and select all three layers
go over to format and click align Center and then align middle and they're all lined up for you and
while you're over in this toolbar and you have them all selected it's a good time to group them
together so if you go under this little icon here you can group them and now they're all one piece
that you can move around the page and they you don't have to worry about moving individual parts
so that was quick you just made your first label super easy and you can make them in
all sorts of shapes and colors and you can label everything in your house like I do and it's great
so now we are going to learn a couple other tricks will make a second label will go into our shape
tool again and this time we'll go under basic shapes and we'll choose this plaque tool right
here and we'll draw it out this time we'll make it about two and a half inches high and four and
a half inches wide I'll give us a nice sized label we'll go to wrap text and choose in front of text
and under effects we'll turn off the shadow choose no shadow and then for the fill this time instead
of doing a solid color or a white let's go down into fill effects and few go under picture or
texture you can choose a picture from a file you can choose any picture on your computer that you
want to put in there so it could be a picture of your kids it could be a pattern of some sort
I have a chalkboard background here that I'm going to use now you can see my chalkboard has
filled my shape here and I'm going to choose no line for this one so it's already pretty well
defined and now I want to add my second layer so we'll go back into shapes we are going to choose
that black shape again and we'll draw it out and we'll go into the formatting we'll choose
in front of text we will turn off that little shadow again and then we'll decide our height
so we will just go slightly smaller than the other one we'll go at about two and a quarter
by four and a quarter inches wide and now let's line them up hold down the command key make sure
both are selected and then align Center and align middle and they're all lined up for you and now we
can format this inside shape here so for a fill since we want to see our chalkboard background
we will choose no fill for the line we will make it white and then to beef it up a little bit we
will go into weights and this time instead of just choosing a solid line we'll go down here and we'll
choose this three point double line just looks a little bit fancier and gives our label a nice
effect and then we will just need to add words to this one as well so if we click our text box we
can drag a text box in here and let's say this one is going in our craft room so we will say
it's for ribbon and we can't see it because it's black so we'll go up here under our font color
and we'll change that to white you can Center it up here as well and we'll choose the font see I
like one called Snell round hand and we'll make it a lot bigger maybe 48 that looks good to me
and then we just need to line them up so I will hold down the command key and push all three of
my layers make sure I get them all selected go under format and a line center and a line middle
and while I have them all selected I can pop up here and group them so it's just one shape
and I can move it all around together and we're done we have two different labels two different
styles you can mix and match and play with them in a million different ways to create all sorts
of different labels to help you get organized around the house or just add a pretty little
touch to any area that you want to so I hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you for watching