I Would Be Lost Without My Label-Maker
About eight years ago, I moved into my first real adult apartment with my friend Celine Katzman. One of our first decisions was to decant all our spices into matching glass jars, which we expressly chose not to label. The label-free jars looked clean and chic; we were such good cooks, the theory went, that we could identify all our spices by sight alone. After months of dumping cayenne into eggs in place of paprika and forgetting the identity of a seasoning we nicknamed “scary spice,” we gave up. Professional chefs are heavy label users, and through trial and error, we found out why: It’s really, really hard to navigate your kitchen if you’re stopping every five minutes to ask yourself whether those white crystals are sugar or MSG.
I now label everything in my kitchen and anywhere else with dense clusters of objects. I used to make them out of painter’s tape and a Sharpie, but last year, I bought something that changed my life: the Brother handheld P-Touch, the second-cheapest option from the big name in label-makers. Some Brother label-makers have more bells and whistles — for example, Jennifer Aniston loves her PTD210, which has discrete keycaps and more fonts and symbols than the handheld. Some models are Bluetooth-enabled, can access web font libraries, and have enough memory to store dozens of labels.
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I can imagine that’s all helpful for heavy-duty use, but I’m perfectly happy with the features on my $35 model. Although other models have more fonts, symbols, and decorative elements, the handheld has more than enough — and 99 percent of the time, I’m using a plain sans-serif font. The user interface is as clunky as you’d expect from a machine that looks like a graphing calculator, but once I got used to it, I preferred its predictability to the bugginess of higher-tech tools.
It is by far the most useful tool in keeping a miscellaneous DIY closet organized — stacks of boxes and bins labeled things like “GLUE, TWINE, AND ZIP TIES” and “SANDPAPER WALL CARE” were impossible to navigate before they all had labels. I’ve learned from my mistake and now print labels for the spices and dry goods we buy in bulk and decant into glass jars, and made one with a fancy font and border for the bitters my partner Warren made with leftover yuzu peels. I’ve made Christmas gift tags and IDs for homemade cocktails at parties, and I label all my cleaning solutions so that “BLEACH” doesn’t get mixed up with “ALL-PURPOSE SPRAY.”
Although a tape-and-Sharpie solution works as well, the label-maker labels are stickier, more durable, and easier to read. I still use tape for temporary labels that aren’t getting much wear and tear — freezer leftovers, for example — but for everything else, I use my Brother P-touch.
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