Taxonomy of Canning: The art of labeling

Caning stuff is fun, convenient, money saving and makes great gifts.
But like any consumable product, if it's packaged well it will be more appealing right? Of course! That's why we like Method so much. It's that loverly pear shaped soap bottle that we swooned over before realizing how great the actual product was. If only all marketing was so benign...

On to the point, if you are a crafty human, making your own labels is superfun. Not just scrawling on a random label with a ink pen, oh nooooo... we are talking computerized labeling bliss for the Photoshop inclined.

Some advice on making labels:
I don't recommend mod pogde.I did this because I did not have sticky labels.
It works, my jam labels are all done that way but... don't recommend it.

I do recommend buying some ink jet or laser printer labels. I bought full sheet stickers. This is an 8.5"x11" sticker. You, of course, print on it and cut out your labels.

I have the option of printing out images in a "wallet picture" layout of 9 images about 3"x2" as a preset template. But Word layouts are easy too.

I use Photoshop to custom make my labels. Word can work too, you just won't get the shnazzy color option and layout is harder. I recommend Publisher or any paint program other than Microsoft Paint.

You can make easy designs and stuff using FONTS. There are a lot of free font sites out there here are my favorites:
Pia Frauss
Manfred Klien
and Font Freak
There are so many fonts to pick it's crazy! I love fonts.
Look for fonts called dingbats or decorative to find pictures, borders, dividers, and other images. These are great. I love them.
PC instructions only, sorry =(
When you find a font you like, download it to your desktop. They will be compressed files. Once you have down loaded all the fonts you want, select them off your desktop suing ctrl and right mouse click. This will let you individually select the files. Then left click on one of the icons and select "extract to...", the window will open to ask where you want the files to go, pick your C drive, program files, WINDOWS and then find the Font folder. and click OK. All the fonts will be extracted and sent to the font folder this way. Open word and check out your font list to see that it worked.

You can also download a program to do this for you. There is a free trial version.
then you can do stuff like this: