How to Make Pantry Labels with Cricut

With spring on the horizon, it’s time to wrap to up those last few organization projects, so you can get back to enjoying the outdoors again. Today, I wanted to share with you an easy way to make your pantry more user friendly and beautiful.

My pantry is quite small and in order to make it functional for my family we needed to use a bin system. The bins work great, but unless you have them memorized, you’d have to open many to find what your are looking for. So, it seemed that labels were a bit of a necessity. And friends, let me tell you, these are so easy to make, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Don’t worry if your pantry does not have bins, these same labels could be applied directly to canisters or boxes. Also, the specific hanging tags I used, can be hung off of just about anything else you might use to organize!

Also, it’s the first Sunday of the month, so that means I’ve teamed up again with some of my favorite fellow projectors to bring you more great kitchen ideas for your home. Be sure to look for their ideas at the end of this post.

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. MEANING, I WILL EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU GO THROUGH THEM AND CHOSE TO MAKE A PURCHASE. PLEASE NOTE, THAT I ONLY INCLUDE LINKS TO PRODUCTS THAT I BELIEVE WILL BE HELPFUL TO YOU, NOT BECAUSE OF THE COMMISSION I RECEIVE. REST ASSURED THAT THERE WILL BE NO ADDITIONAL COST INCURRED TO YOU IF YOU CHOSE TO MAKE A PURCHASE THROUGH ONE OF MY LINKS.

What you will need:

• 24 hanging wooden chalkboard tags
• any Cricut or other vinyl cutting machine, I have a Cricut Explore Air 2 but you can use any, including the new Cricut Joy for this project
• white permanent vinyl and standard grip transfer tape
• cricut tools
• cricut cutting mat
• hot glue gun or duct tape

I chose to label my chalkboard signs using The Skinny font which is free for anyone to download and use for personal use. I have used it previously in other places in my kitchen and I love both the aesthetic and the practicality of it. Last year, I reorganized all of my spices and labeled them all with this same font. You can read all about it and get my free printable spice labels here.

I also remade a thrift store basket into a farmhouse style bread basket using this font. It’s an easy font to fall in love with.

Now it’s time to figure out how many labels you need and what you need them to say. I needed all 24 this time around and I wanted my labels to look uniform, so I tried to find logical words for each that had around the same number of letters. I found that right around 7 letters usually looks the most ideal.

How to Make Labels with Cricut

Then, using the Cricut Design software I created each of my vinyl labels. When doing this you’ll want to make sure you stay within the confines of 1.25″ tall and 2.5″ wide. I, personally, found it more attractive to decrease the space between letters if I had to fit a larger word and increase the space between them if I had a particularly short word. Then, I clicked weld on each of my words and cut them onto white vinyl using my 12X12 cutting mat and my Cricut Explore Air 2. I used my scissors to cut apart the individual words and my hooked weeding tool to pull the background vinyl off of each.

Next, I cut a 2.5″ X1.25″ section of transfer tape, peeled the backing, and applied it to the top of my first vinyl word. Then, I peeled the backing off of my white vinyl. When doing this, I have found that it is easier to flip my transfer tape and vinyl face down on a flat surface so I have to peel back the backing. Just simply flipping it over like this first usually reduces a lot of the common headaches during this step. Then, I centered it over my first chalkboard sign and pressed it into place, making sure to smooth it out using the scraper tool. The final step is to pull the transfer tape off and admire your finished sign.

Repeat the above steps for each subsequent chalkboard sign.

Now, its time to attach your labels. I chose to use hot glue, but duct tape would also work. It’s for projects like these that a cordless hot glue gun really shines. For the plastic, basket-styled bins, I simply placed a dot of hot glue on the inside of the bin where I wanted to anchor the twine of each tag. You could do similarly for a fabric bin, a rope coil bin, or a woven basket bin. Then, once it dried, I went back and cut the excess twine.

Wire Basket Labels

However, for my wire baskets, I didn’t want to try to anchor the twine to thin wire sections, so, I instead wrapped the twine over one of the horizontal sections of wire and then anchored the twine to the back of the hanging tag itself using a dot of hot glue. Then you just repeat for each label, trim your excess twine and your labels are all attached!

These labels are so versatile, I now have them all over my house. I have a few in my laundry room for various bins of cleaning products. In my daughters’ bedrooms for the bins I used to organize their folded clothes in their closets. In my front hall and even out in my kitchen for our fruit “bowl” and my bread basket.

You can see in my full pantry picture that I have other sorting boxes and bins that mimic the same font shown on these hanging tags. By simply keeping the font consistent you still get that very uniform aesthetic even when different types of sorting containers are in use. For example, I have three, white, Dollar Tree, plastic, bushel style bins up top and while I could have hung one of these tags off of each, I decided instead to label them directly with black vinyl.

I also used a number of plastic shoe box style containers from the Dollar Tree and chose to label those directly with black vinyl. Side note, after doing this, I found it was too busy looking with just the black vinyl, so I ended up affixing white cardstock to the inside of each bin. In hindsight, I could have labeled these by printing each word directly on cardstock and then affixing it to the inside. But either way, I love how these look and how easy it is to see whats inside.

I also have a few canisters that are labeled directly with black vinyl. For each of these, I painted the lids white and then affixed the black vinyl directly to it. You could always label the side of the glass instead but I didn’t want these to appear busy so I chose to label the tops.

To say I’m pleased with the finished look would be the understatement of the century! It was a complete transformation, and so easy and fast to do.

If you’re looking for more inspiration for your kitchen, check out these other great ideas from some of my favorite creators.

Grandma’s House DIY – Basement Refrigerator Makeover – Before and After!

Health Home and Heart – Painted Tile Backsplash Update

Life as a Leo Wife – Dollar Tree Crate Shelf

DISCLOSURE: THIS POST CONTAINED AFFILIATE LINKS (*). MEANING, I WILL EARN A COMMISSION IF YOU GO THROUGH THEM AND CHOSE TO MAKE A PURCHASE. PLEASE NOTE, THAT I ONLY INCLUDE LINKS TO PRODUCTS THAT I BELIEVE WILL BE HELPFUL TO YOU AND NOT BECAUSE OF THE COMMISSION I RECEIVE. REST ASSURED THAT THERE WILL BE NO ADDITIONAL COST INCURRED TO YOU IF YOU CHOSE TO MAKE A PURCHASE THROUGH ONE OF MY LINKS.