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May 30, 2008

Got Gocco?

Exciting news! Bridal Guide and the real brides over at Weddingbee.com have teamed up to bring you their personal wedding planning stories. Today, Miss Tiramisu shares her DIY invitation project.

Hello! I was honored to be asked to guest blog over here at Bridal Guide, and I thought I'd share with you my biggest wedding project so far: the invitations!

My invitations were the first wedding DIY project I tackled. I had high hopes for them, but wasn't sure that I was up for making them myself. However, after a little searching, I couldn't find anything to purchase that was just perfect...and that meant I'd have to do it myself! Enter: GOCCO.

Gocco! Gocco? This word didn't enter my vocabulary until I became a bride-to-be. A Gocco, for those of you who don't know, is a magical little printing machine that can be used to create wedding invitations, stationery and tons of other paper projects. It can even be used to print on fabric and other surfaces, but I haven't gotten that adventurous yet! I purchased my machine on eBay after reading about all of the gorgeous wedding projects the bee bloggers over at weddingbee.com were making. I got the PG-5, which looks just like this:

It's super easy to use and is powered by your own two hands. You can print just about anything that you can design using your computer, draw using the special carbon pen, or photocopy.

With a little help from Mr. Tiramisu and Photoshop, I designed an invitation set using a swirl motif:

I did a few "warm-up" projects with my Gocco before tackling my invites—a set of stationery for my Mom, stationery for my shower hostesses, and a set for my best friend who is getting married herself this month. I highly recommend doing this to get used to the process. It's not hard, but there are some little tricks to it that are best discovered when you're not knee-deep in your expensive invitation paper!

Here are a few of my early trial runs:

Once my Gocco confidence was up, I was ready to start the invitations. The first step to the Gocco process is burning your screen. To do this, you need a printout or photocopy of your final design, a Gocco screen, the Gocco flash unit and two flash bulbs. I wish I could take a picture of the Gocco flash bulbs going off—it's blinding, but very exciting! All you do is attach the flash unit to the printing unit, close your eyes and press down! This process requires two batteries, located inside the Gocco unit. Once you flash the screen, you discard the bulbs (which are single-use only) and are left with your design now burned onto a screen. The burning process basically creates tiny holes in the screen where your ink will flow through.

The next step is to ink your screen. Here's what my invitation screen looked like all inked up with Gocco gold ink:

This screen gets inserted back into the holder in the Gocco print unit, and you are ready to print. This is the fun (and muscle-building) part! Simply press down on the unit, and a print is made.

Here's the outcome of my gold invite printing:

I used a total of 10 screens (and messed up on an extra 3 screens!) to make my wedding invitations, the 3 enclosures, the outside and RSVP envelopes, and the card that held them all together. With the cost of the paper (ordered from paper-source), Gocco supplies (but not the machine itself, since I'm using it for lots of other things!), the ribbon, envelope-lining paper, and the special paper clips we used to hold the enclosures together, the invitations ended up costing $2.79 each.

Here's the finished product!

We'll be sending these out in two weeks! Are you DIY-ing your invitations? Any fellow Gocco'ers out there? They were pretty time consuming, but I had so much fun making these!

Posted by Miss Tiramisu at 10:02 a.m.

tags:

•  
• DIY,
• Invitations