Sunday, August 16, 2009

Labels for your Child’s Clothing

Has your child ever forgotten their coat at school? When you ask them what happened to their jacket, do they tell you they don’t know? Have you ever spent days and days or maybe months looking through the lost and found pile hoping your child’s coat will appear? I always use a sharpie to write their name on the existing label inside their jackets. It is hard to read because I am writing over the printing. I keep thinking that I need to get some clothing labels. However, I have never seen any in the stores. It occurred to me that I have some Dark T-Shirt Transfer paper that I could use to make labels with.

I decided to make some labels in Excel. For demonstration purposes I used my name but I actually made half the labels for each child.

printscreen excell

For the font I used the 14 size and selected bold typing. I also choose to center the text. I formatted the row height as 40 to give me plenty of room to cut between each label. I adjusted my page settings to give minimum boarders around the edges to maximize my printable space. When I filled all the cells with my name I adjusted the column width to maximize the space between each name. I typed child A into column A and B and then Child B into column C and D. This way I can just cut off one row at time and have two labels for each child ready to go. I opted not to print the grid around each name but you could add it in to help you when cutting them apart. *****DON'T FORGET TO PUT THEIR HOME ROOM NUMBER ON THERE TOO********

Dark T-shirt iron on transfer paper

Print out your page on some Dark T-Shirt Transfer paper. It will give your labels a nice white background. Please note that on stretchy material the label will over time crack. According to the instructions you can re-iron the label to fuse the cracks back together.

I now have an entire sheet of 38 labels per child to iron on my boy’s jackets and other fabric articles that go to school with my boys. I will just cut off a row as I need the labels.

I don’t know why I have never thought of this before!! Maybe it is because I didn’t have this stuff on hand before. I had bought it for another project. You don’t have to worry about printing your letter backwards because you peel off the backing and place the transfer sheet printed side up on the fabric to iron it on.

I am sure there are other’s who have figured this out long before me but I felt this was something worth sharing. I figure there are other people out there like me that this solution may not have occurred to them. You can get this transfer product at your local craft store or on line. I am sure that larger fabric store may also carry this item.

Hope you have a great school year!!!

Katrina

P.S. School starts tomorrow for us. Wish me luck that I don’t start to cry in front of my little guy. I am suppose to be strong so that I don’t transfer my anxiety to him about starting school. So far so good, as long as I don’t think about not having any little ones at home with me during the day. Tomorrow is a transition for the both of us. Preschool was only a few short hours every day but Kindergarten is all day here.

2 comments:

Lacie @ Creative Attempts said...

I love this!!! Such a great idea. My son isn't in school yet but this will definatly come in handy when he is!!

Mrs. M said...

If you can't find this try to find uniform marking tape. They probably have it at military suplus stores. Its what the military uses to mark their uniforms with (so you KNOW it has to last, military uniforms go through the ringer) as well as some boy scouts I know. Its basically iron on white "tape" for want of a better word. Its really simple to use, I marked all of my husbands uniforms and all of mine in like an hour and a half. Of course I had a stamp of our last name so I just had to change the first initial when I switched whose uniforms I was doing.