Gift Tags & Labels Generator

Twelve tags, one sheet of card, five minutes

Type a heading and the page fills with tags, each on a dashed cut line. Three across and four down by default, which is twelve. Push it to four by six for twenty-four smaller ones when there are a lot of presents.

Two styles, and they are genuinely different objects rather than the same thing at different sizes.

Tag or label

• Gift tag. A hang tag with a punch-hole circle at the top for ribbon, a coloured accent strip across it, your heading, and ruled To and From lines underneath ready to write on. Birthdays and Christmas, weddings, party bags.
• Label. A bordered rectangle, a heading band, and one to four ruled lines. Jars and lunchboxes. File folders. Homemade jam.

The heading prints on every tag on the sheet, which is what makes a matching set possible. A name, an occasion, or a category word like Spices or Toys.

Twelve party bags

Tag style, Happy Birthday typed as the heading, three by four, cut guides left on. Printed on light card, cut along the dashes, ribbon holes punched a touch wider than the printed circle, and each child's name written on the To line.

Twelve matching tags for the cost of one sheet of card, and they look deliberate rather than improvised, which is the entire difference between a printed tag and a piece of paper with a name on it.

The following week, same generator: label style, two writing lines, heading set to Pantry, for a batch of chutney.

Cutting and punching

• Light card for anything hanging off a ribbon. Plain paper for anything being stuck down.
• Adhesive label sheets for jars. Or plain paper and a glue stick, which works fine and costs nothing.
• Punch the ribbon hole a little wider than the printed circle, because thick ribbon will not go through a hole sized for thread and you will find that out on tag one.
• Print at full scale, because fit-to-page shifts every one of the cut guides by a millimetre or two and you will not notice until the fourth tag.
• A craft knife against a metal ruler beats scissors across twenty-four tags.

Who ends up printing these

Anyone wrapping presents at eleven at night

The honest answer, and the reason the tag style is what loads first.

Home organisers

Storage boxes and pantry jars, freezer bags, shelves. Label style with two lines, so there is somewhere to put a date underneath the contents rather than squeezing it into a corner.

Teachers and parents

Lunchboxes, coat pegs, drawers, trays, craft supplies. Consistency is the point: thirty labels in one typeface look like a system, and thirty in marker pen do not.

Makers and bakers

Tie a tag to a jar of jam or a candle for a market stall, or stick a label on the lid. Both styles handle it and the accent strip does more visual work than it costs.