Hi there - Amy Hall here of the Two Glassy Ladies. I am a lampwork bead maker from Victoria, BC. Today I am going to share with you my technique for labeling my glass rods. This brief photo tutorial takes you through my personal system for rod labeling, with templates included to make your own labels.

The art glass used for lampwork bead making comes in rod form, and usually when you buy it, only some or none of the rods are labeled by their colour name/number. Since I end up with a bunch of colours all over my workspace on any given session at my torch, I like to keep track of which is which - especially since some of the colours can be hard to tell apart. (That and, I'm a little bit neurotic and I like to know exactly which colours I'm using so I can recreate a reaction or avoid something that didn't work.)

I have tried different methods for labeling my rods over the years, from using a sharpie or silver pen to write the number of the colour on the end of the rod, or using stickers or masking tape to make labels. I finally started printing labels on label paper and cutting them out. It is surprisingly not that time consuming and the end product is really nice and neat looking.

I use white shipping labels that are Avery 8163 format. There are 10 labels to a page. I can fit 20 of my labels on each of these big labels (I cut them out), so I get 200 rod labels for each page.

Here is a link to one of my templates in Open Office format, and here is a link to one in PDF. You can obviously make your own and don't necessarily need to use the same labels I did, although I found this size was perfect to wrap around the standard size glass rods.

If you cut them right, you can always have a little end bit to "grab" onto when peeling the labels off. That helps save some time.

And that's basically all there is to it! My printer was being kind of funky when I made these labels so the text isn't perfectly clear, but it's good enough. (I think I forgot to tell my printer it was printing on labels).

http://www.twoglassyladies.ca/