Labeling Jars/Bottles.

When I was a rather young witch I got a few of the "essential" herbs and some jars. My first mistake was putting adhesive labels on the jars, my second mistake was hand-writing the names on them. My writing is... downright awful.

About a year down the line I wanted to re-use the jars, and it took several hours of scrubbing in hot water to get the adhesive off of them, because stacking labels has annoyed me deeply since the days of yore. I got rid of the adhesive label.

First: Wash and dry your jars. I suggest the "sanitize" cycle on a dishwasher for most jars, but some are too delicate or weirdly made. For those, HOTHOTHOT water in a sink with a good dish soap. For tinctures, or any other liquid (or for things you're going to ingest a lot of) I strongly suggest you use canning jars. Best to not risk poisoning yourself off of an antique Strychnine bottle, no matter how cool it looks. Ensure all lids, caps and corks fit properly. I've had jars that didn't quite "seal", and had a bunch of beetles infest my herbs, ruining them and costing me a pretty penny.

I also suggest not hand-writing the labels, unless your handwriting is very regular, very readable, and very bold. Personally, I design mine on the computer in photoshop (or gimp), and print them on various artisan papers to get unique looks out of 'em. My reason for the aesthetics? They take up a lot of space, I want 'em to look pretty while they do it.

The Process

Here's one of my old bottles. That label annoys me. The design is a faded, water-maked, Celtic knot-work, which is nice but - not so fancy, and lacked information. I lettered it with an ink pen that appears to fade incredibly fast. In the poor light of the temple-room (I hate ceiling lights with a passion due to chronic migraines) I can't read the label and may accidentally grab the identical Gum Arabic bottle when aiming for the copal.


Next I get a bowl of warm water and a sponge. I get the sponge soaking wet and apply it right over the label. This saturates it and re-hydrates the glue, making it release from both the label and jar. If I'm cleaning out old jars to re-use, rather than just re-labeling something, the whole lot goes into the kitchen sink or bath tub with some soap. Once the labels are off, they go into the dish washer (if it's safe).

Wow, this label was thirsty. It turned completely translucent in a couple of seconds and peeled off easily.
You can also see a potential downfall of hand-lettering with a fine pen - moisture just destroys the lettering.

Nearly every commercial jar I've messed with will work the same. Most labels will peel off dry, but a few are glued over the entire label, and have to be soaked. I save all of the jars from pasta sauce, pickles, etc. and re-use them for herbs and tinctures.

AHH! The secret weapon. A craft glue-stick. These things are so damned useful (brand names aside). I've repaired tarot cards, used one to plaster a (temporary) letter of annoyance on a bad neighbor's car, and oh yes, to glue my herb labels on.

I apply this over the entire back of the label, and it gives me enough time to get the label even, centered and smoothed out before setting up completely.


Here's the completed bottle. The label tells me what the herb is, what the latin name is (I think the "spp." may be an error on my part. I don't know what type of Copaifera it is, and I was always taught "spp." is the appropriate abbreviation for "species" but I don't much care if it is wrong). It also tells me that this is an incense material, given the swirly incense burner bit on the label.

Some are marked with a skull (poisonous), or a teacup (teas/edible herbs), others are marked with a pentacle (non-incense-able herbs for witchy purposes that do not fit into another category).

In the eventual temple I'll be switching over to larger jars for almost everything, and will also include planetary, elemental and "used for" type info to act as a handy reminder for myself and others.

For reference, this label uses Caslon Antique as it's font (packaged as "tsp adore 10") . I used it because it's highly readable with a corroded, antique, look. Many fonts similar to this are both readable and whimsical enough to be a sound addition to any font-o-phile's library. I've had a local store show high interest in getting a set of customized labels for their jars, which would be a delightfully fun project!

Well, that's one container down and an absurdly large number left to go!