hey it's Abby and today I wanted to answer one of the most common questions
that I've gotten since we started this channel and that is how do you make your
labels that you have on just about everything around your house? So the
answer is I use the silhouette machine it's a cutting machine and adhesive
vinyl to make them and I'm going to walk through the steps today so that you can
make them too. Before we get started I wanted to invite you to follow us over
at our new Instagram account @abbyorganizes where we'll be sharing even
more organization inspiration and tips.
Here's everything you'll need to make your pretty labels with your silhouette.
Your silhouette cutting machine and the silhouette studio software, adhesive
vinyl, transfer tape, a craft cutter and/or scissors, a measuring tape, a
scraper tool and hook tool and some sort of surface for your label. So if you
remember last week in our video we organized our boys playroom and I
created a little craft cart for them so today I'm going to demonstrate making
labels for some of the little containers that are on their craft cart. So the
first thing I always do is measure my item I grab the bin I use this little
soft measuring tape to measure how wide I want my label to be and also how tall
and I make note of that so that when I go into my Silhouette software I know
exactly how big to make my font so now we are going to go over to the computer
to create our labels. I am going to type out the word that I want and then change
it to the font I like a font called crushed it's a Google font it's free I
use it for a lot of my labels I just think it looks really nice and so that
is the one that you'll see on a lot of my labels around our house and then I'm
going to resize it to be the size that I want based on what I measured for and
then an easy way to make a second label is just to right click and then press
duplicate it'll duplicate that word and it will already be in the correct font
so then I just get my cursor in there and I write the new word
and I have the two labels that I want to make. Now I do want to make a note about
using a cursive font. There's one extra step you'll want to do just to make sure
a cursive font flows together nicely so I'm going to demonstrate. I'll write the
word crayons again and I'll use a cursive font I know I like called
Carolyna Pro-Black and to make sure that all of these letters flow into each
other and that there aren't extra cuts between your letters you're going to
right-click it and then you're going to select weld and that just makes sure all
the letters flow together after I weld them I drag my cursor around all of the
parts of the word and I right-click again and I group it and that allows me
to move the word around as a unit and resize it or whatever I need to do
from there so we're not going to use the cursive font this time I just want to
show to demonstrate so I'm going to delete that and since we have our two
labels that we want to cut we can get ready to send those to the silhouette so
I'm going to push the send to silhouette button and before we actually send it
and cut it I'm going to go into adjust cut settings and just make sure
everything is correct in here so under the material type I wanted to make sure
I have vinyl selected and then it will give us some recommendations for
settings to use down here so on my blade it's telling me that I should use blade
number one so I want to check my blade and make sure that I'm on number one and
that that's selected and then I also always just use their recommendations
when it comes to speed and thickness so it's recommending a speed of five and a
thickness of ten and I don't change that. So I'm ready to go and we can load our
vinyl into the machine now since I'm working with a fairly
large piece of vinyl I am just going to put it right into the machine so on my
machine I'm going to choose the load media option. If I was working with a
smaller piece of vinyl or I just wanted to use a cutting mat I could do that as
well then I would just put my vinyl on to the cutting mat and instead of
choosing load media I would choose load cutting mat so there are two options for
that I think it's just easier to do it without the mat so if I have a big
enough piece of vinyl I typically choose the load media and just load my vinyl
right into the machine. And now that our vinyl is loaded we can push send to
silhouette and it will cut everything so once my project is cut I like to use my
paper slicer or you could also use scissors to slice off the part with your
words on it don't cut off a new your words by accident and then I cut them
apart so I have each word individually and then I weed off any of the vinyl
that I don't want that's not part of my label. S o for the big pieces I can just
peel that off with my fingers sometimes oh these ones are pretty big I would
probably just use you know my fingernails to weed out the letters for
this one but if you get smaller letters and you have a trickier spot you can use
the hook tool to weed out some of the pieces that you don't want in there so
that you just have the exact word and the exact vinyl that you're going to
want to put on your project so once my label is weeded and looks the way I want
it and then I need to get out my transfer tape and this is going to help
me make sure that I am taking the whole word as a unit and putting it on my
project if I try to take each letter individually it probably wouldn't line
up exactly and look really pretty so transfer tape helps me transfer the
entire word together so I will just see how big I need to make it and I will cut
it to size and then I peel off the backing and then the transfer tape is
sticky so I put it down over top of my label and if you can line it up with the
markings usually they're marked off by one inch
markings on the transfer tape that will make it a lot easier when you go to
apply it to your bin or whatever you're putting your label on so I try to get
everything lined up nice and neatly and put the transfer tape on my label and
then I use the scraper tool to kind of really scrape at it and make sure that
the vinyl is going to adhere to the transfer tape
so once I've scraped it then I carefully peel off the backing of my vinyl
sometimes if the vinyl wants to pull up with the backing you kind of have to
manipulate it with your fingers a little bit and hold it in place so that the
vinyl stays on the transfer tape and you're backing comes off clean and then
once I have done that I am ready to apply it to my little container. N ow at
this point you can be as picky about spacing and getting things straight as
you want to be or not so sometimes I'll take my measuring tape and I'll measure
and make sure I'm exactly lined up other times I'll just try to eyeball it these
containers are pretty easy because they have a little dot right in the middle
and then since I lined up my label on the transfer tape exactly I can just
count the inches and find the middle point of that so I can eyeball it pretty
well in this circumstance. In other circumstances you want to might want to
measure even use a little level if you want to get it exactly centered and look
straight so I put down my transfer tape that has my label on it exactly
where I want it and then again I take my scraper and I scrape over the word
because now I want the label the vinyl to come off of the transfer tape and to
stick on to my bin so I scrape at it and then I very carefully peel off the
transfer tape so that the vinyl stays on my bin and then the transfer tape comes
up clean and then my label is on the bin and it looks beautiful and everybody
knows what goes in what bin. When I have acrylic bins I really like to put the
label at the bottom because it's kind of a nice surprise when you lift the item
out and you see this pretty little label at the bottom of your bin it just gives
it that extra little touch and for these practically speaking when my boys come
on you know they're gonna do this when they dump out all of their crayons and
markers then there's no question where everything goes back they can see
exactly where they put each of their items into place. Now you can do way more
with the silhouette machine than just making labels. The possibilities are
literally endless I'm not a silhouette guru but I will link to my friend
Melissa from silhouette school she has a channel where you can learn even more
about all things silhouette so I hope it was helpful to see how I make my
favorite types of labels I know not everybody has a silhouette machine or
wants to buy one so I actually have two other labeling tutorials that I'll link
to in the description about how to make labels with programs that you already
have access to on your computer. If you want to see even more labeling videos
make sure to hit that like button and let me know in the comments.