In case I didn't mention it before, I printed our invites using a gocco. Since there have been many informative tutorials on gocco printing by other bees all linked to the wiki so I don't think we need to rehash all the details here again, but I wanted to share some tips and tricks with you that I found helpful!!1. Be prepared for a mess. Printing and drying takes up a good amount of space. Also prepare for the fact that you will 'print' at least once without putting paper in and then have to clean your screen. (A little windex does the trick!)
2. Never print the first few prints on your good paper. Do at least two or three prints to get the ink evened out and to understand where you need to align your paper.3. If you are going to 'wash' and reuse your screen cover the edges in clear plastic packing tape. Make sure you don't cover up any of the area that got 'burned' but also that you cover all the surrounding chipboard area. Otherwise when you wash the ink off the edges of your screen will soak up the water and get mushy and warped.
4. To help align your design make small marks on your gocco pad to help you perfectly align them each time. I emphasized these marks more than I actually drew them on the pad (these were to align our envelopes) but they were SO helpful! (Again, just wash them off with windex when you are done!!)
5. Do double duty if you can! Plan your screens so that you can burn more than one image if you have enough space. I planned out my screens so that there were more than one element on each since gocco supplies are so precious now-a-days! The screen below has all the elements for the backs of our cards and the 'and' that was between our names. I printed the 'and' first, and then simply covered it with a peice of paper so that the ink wouldn't transfer when I was printing the other sections. Another 'double duty' tip : I sized our address for our RSVP cards so we could also use it for the return address on our outer envelope. I printed the RSVP envelopes first since the ink was a lighter color (then washed it) and printed the navy ink on the outer envelopes!
6. Use ink blocker around your design even if you are only printing in one color. The ink is going to spread out all over your screen once you press down, if you use the ink blocker it restricts the ink to a certain area and therefore less ink is wasted since it cannot spread out all over the screen.
**Right after I took this pic I turned around to set my camera on the coffee table and hit the gocco with my knee, it proceeded to slam down and printed a RSVP on my registration plate - hence tip #1.7. If you are printing to the edges of your paper be prepared to clean your registration plate and screen a lot more than normal. I extended the lines from our names past the edges of the paper to make sure they would print all the way to the edges. Not my smartest move, now each time I printed a little extra ink squirted out where I had extended the line. So roughly every 5 or so prints I cleaned the registration plate and excess ink off the screen at the very end of the lines. O'well, you live and you learn.
8. Keep your screens!! We had a few people that didn't recieve our save the dates so I'm keeping our invite screens just in case we need to make more. I wrapped them in plastic wrap and put them in a plastic bag in the fridge - this keeps the ink from drying (mostly).
Do you have any useful gocco tipes to share?
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