Colored paper clips here, but with the warning that by the end of the season, red, orange, and maybe even pink clips can all start to look alike.
I've found it helpful to have clips in two sizes (regular and xlarge), clips that are striped (you can get these in small quantities on Amazon; use them only for parents you will only be using a few times), and clips that are metallic colored (as opposed to the dull vinyl coating). I do very few dip crosses, and I know which plants are dips anyway, so I use both size clips for whichever parents I wish, making the assignment based in part on how many crosses I expect to do with a particular pollen parent, and how many clips I have of which sizes and colors. I may also use the same color and size clip for both a tet parent and a dip parent, because I know there will be no confusion (I am not putting tet pollen on dips, and vice versa). So a regular sized white clip, for example, may indicate either 'Newberry White Dove' (if the pod parent is a dip) or 'White Wolf' (if the pod parent is a tet).
Sometimes there are so many different pollen parents in play, that I run out of individual clip assignments. At that point, I start using two clips, firmly clipped together, to indicate a pollen parent. So, for example, white alone might be 'White Wolf', but white and pink together might be 'Arctic Lace'.
Finally, I largely gave up on using paper tags, because the snails were eating the marker writing off the surface of the tag!
(Plus, those paper tags are just very much in-your-face and unsightly.
) But I recently bought some, just in case there are some good seedlings this season that need crossing right away.
