Hand Lettered Magazine Holders

Our little office is one of the first rooms in our home that we renovated. Inevitably when renovating a house, you end up with a load of paperwork, bills, home magazines and brochures. We were quickly starting to lose track of everything so finishing the office (which also happens to be the smallest room in our home) was definitely a priority.

Our system for storing paperwork has worked well enough (it’s mainly sorted in folders), but one thing that we never managed to get round to quite finishing was to properly label the magazine holders.

After I painted them (Knuff from Ikea in case you’re wondering) they just ended up getting shoved onto the shelf and we’ve been using our totally glamorous Post-it labelling system ever since.

In an attempt to be a bit more organised and actually know what’s in our magazine holders (the Post-it notes have a tendency to drop off and stick to the floor), we’ve finally come up with a really easy and really cheap solution (it’s free) – just write on them!

To keep the magazine holders looking tidy, we decided that it would be easiest to print the labels and then trace them onto the holders rather than just write straight onto them.

To achieve the slightly hand-scripted look, we chose a font (League Script) that we liked and enhanced it a bit by adding thicker areas to the letters.

The next step was to transfer the writing to the back of the magazine holder.

Draw over the back of the wording with a pencil (a really soft one works best).
Position the word on the back of the magazine holder and secure using some tape.
Trace around your word pressing firmly.
Double check that you’ve traced everything before removing your template.

Then it’s just a matter of drawing over your pencil lines. We used a Sharpie which worked really well and didn’t smudge at all.