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I have collected shot glasses for our entire marriage, so it was only obvious that shot glasses should be our favors for the vow renewal.  After doing lots of research, I came across a tutorial on Weddingbee for goccoing on glass and set off to create my own custom etched shot glasses.  Here they are, encased in their custom handemade boxes, at each place setting.

{Mark Brooke}

To etch glass, all you will need is your trusty gocco, painters tape, q-tips, and Armour Etch glass etching cream, which you can purchase at your local craft store.

Prep: burn a gocco screen with your desired design (burn multiple to a screen if your design allows).  After the screen is burned, cut the screen around your design, leaving a sizable margin.  Thoroughly wash your glassware.  Using painters tape, tape the screen as tightly as possible to the glass.

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Following a June filled with invitation construction, we needed a break from the Gocco. But this past weekend — the last one before the wedding! — we got reacquainted with our old friend.

Project #1: Cocktail Napkins

My mom suggested we add our monogram to red and orange cocktail napkins to use during the cocktail hour and to distribute with our cupcakes during the reception. I’ll admit that this wasn’t at the top of my to do list, but I found some down time on Sunday evening, and I figured I’d give it a go. It was surprisingly easy!

I Gocco’d our monogram in white onto 300 napkins (cost $12 total). I then stacked them in alternating colors and bagged them for our coordinator to display.

Project #2: Gifts for the Groomsmen

This one was all Nick’s idea, believe it or not! He wanted to give each groomsman a photo from the bachelor party. So we headed to Michaels with our 40% coupons in tow and bought barn wood frames, glass backing kits, and blue mats. He then decided it would be cool to Gocco “OBX 2009″ onto each of the mats. We’re both pretty pleased with how they turned out!

What last minute Gocco projects did you do?

About a month ago I made thank you cards. Lots and lots of them. With lined envelopes, of course. I love sending paper cards. Writing them feels a little decadent, and opening the mailbox to a pretty envelope makes my day. Some of my friends send wonderful mail, so I have a set standard already.

I again used the pewter design from our invitations, and a calligraphed “Thank You” drawn by my talented friend Amy. Then it occurred to me to snag our return address from our keepsake invitation envelope.

There’s two easy steps to that kind of piracy: 1) ask your calligrapher for their permission first 2) once you have their blessing, take a high-quality digital photo, as straight-on as you can. Then use any photo editing software to up the contrast and brightness until you have a clean image of the text.

A few Gocco screens and much embossing powder later, I was very excited about writing notes. Which made it easier to knock the shower ones out right away. There’s a small trick to the embossing, too. Right after a Gocco press, shake embossing powder over the wet ink. Flick off the extra, and set it aside. When you run out of table space, fire up the embossing gun for the whole batch.

What did you do for thank you notes? Do you think it’s impolite to print Thank You on the front? Some people do. You can say so, I don’t mind - I’m still blissed over the calligraphy.

In November EAD held a DIY contest, and E. encouraged me to enter my invitations, still in progress. Oh sure, I said, If I finish them soon! E., I totally did not finish them soon. Ladies- (And gentlemen? If you include DJ and one brother) I finished printing the maps on July 17, the night before we mailed them. Expert procrastinator. Hey E., can I enter now??

They’re a hot Gocco’ed mess of not-a-graphic-designer, but I’m pretty happy with how they came out. I had a fabulous time making them and they have all the pertinent information, so… success!

I’m not entirely sure when I decided I “needed” to Gocco some personalized cocktail napkins, but it was quite some time ago…months ago, in fact. And just when I had decided the cocktail napkins could be pushed to the back burner, Heather (who is my wedding day twin!) posted photos of her awesome cocktail napkins and I immediately knew personalized napkins were once again on the agenda. Heather scored her napkins on sale at Party City, but I picked mine up from The WEBstaurant Store, in the dove gray color, for about $13 with shipping and they arrived just a few days later. I spent about an hour this evening printing all 250 napkins and I have to say, this might just be among the most satisfying $13 and 60 minutes I’ve invested in the wedding to date. I am so glad I decided not to skip out on the napkins - I totally love how they turned out!

Is anyone else planning to DIY personalized napkins? Make sure to share if you do!

I’m sure you’ve all been on the edges of your computer chairs waiting to see our final invitations! Well, I hate to disappoint, but they’re not quite ready for prime time. To be honest, Nick and I have had little time to work on them lately, what with showers and parties.

I may not be ready to show you the finished products, but I do want to tell you how we plan to pull them all together.

Here’s where we left off: Tackling the Gocco:

Since then, Michael and JoAnn have become two of my new best friends. And by that I mean, I’ve spent quite a bit of time at Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics.

Here’s the rundown of recent purchases:

• Embossing Powder
• Circle Cutter
• Glass Mat
• X-Acto Knife
• Cream Cardstock
• Orange Cardstock
• Orange Ribbon

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How do girls getting married in just over a month spend their weekend? Crafting, of course! I’ve been working on a lot of easy but time consuming projects this weekend. Table name signs, escort cards, M’s wedding gift, and a mock up of our ceremony programs so I can start trimming down the stock for the covers and laying out pages in InDesign. Am I the only one who gets really really excited to see something working out as planned? Consider me really excited right now. I’m in love with how this mock up program turned out!

Pretty blue cover stock, kraft paper pages and blue-striped baker’s twine? Heaven! This is also going to prove a useful tool when laying out the pages. I can see the hardest part involving figuring out how to ensure the fronts and backs of the pages line up so they print nice and aligned, but for now I am trying not to worry about that one. In the meantime, here’s what I am planning for pages and content -

{front cover} some sort of Gocco magic going on
{page 1} a title page of sorts with our names, wedding date, etc.
{page 2} a welcome message
{page 3} order of events
{page 4}  bridesmaids/bridesman introductions
{page 5}  groomsmen introductions
{page 6}  thank you note and directions to the champagne reception after the ceremony
{page 7}  recognition of loved ones who can’t be with us
{page 8}  recognition of our belief in gay marriage rights and hope for all men and women to soon be able to marry the person of their choice
{back cover}  some more Gocco magic

Is anyone else working on a program project right now? Let me know if you have any tips for printing book layouts front to back so the pages work properly when assembled.

Parrott Design Studio is one of my favorite invitation studios.  Sarah Parrott (the designer and namesake behind Parrott Design Studio) specializes in custom letterpress and screenprinted invitations and stationery.  Sarah has a lovely design style that incorporates vintage graphics and floral imagery - I literally “ooh” and “aah” over each new project that she posts on her blog and website:

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Last we chatted I told you about my reluctance to take the Gocco out of its perfectly packed box. But it had to be done. So I spent many hours reading tips on Weddingbee and right here on EAD. I watched videos on YouTube, and I found a very detailed tutorial on Flickr.

There are so many resources out there, and I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do want to share with you some lessons I learned along the way.

Design Phase

• Buy vector illustrations. This will make your life a lot easier! We found our tree on iStockphoto, and it cost just $10.
• The Gocco is capable of printing pretty fine detail, if used correctly, but I don’t recommend using less that 9px font.
• Create a “safe zone” for graphics and text. The Gocco PG-5 pad is exactly 3.75 x 5.75. BUT I suggest not designing larger than 3.5 x 5.5. We learned this the hard way and had to resize our invitation text (after wasting two bulbs, one screen, ink, and several invitations!).

Print Phase

• As I mentioned, the size of the Gocco pad may be smaller than the size of your paper. For us, it’s perfect for our 3.5 x 5 RSVP postcards, but not ideal for our 4.5 x 6.5 invitations. Mrs. Penguin offers a great tutorial on how to print onto an area larger than the pad. Basically you need to break your design into pieces and stamp each one separately – we burned one screen for the tree and one for the text.
• Convert all documents to black and white and print on either a laser jet printer, or create a photocopy using carbon ink. Make sure to check your copies if your design has fine detail. The Office Max copy machine didn’t do a thorough enough job, so we had to ask them to print it from behind the counter.

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Last Friday I traveled to my parents’ house with a Gocco, a Xyron, an embosser, 8 lbs. of paper, and a whole lot of anticipation!

As much as I want to jump right in and tell you all about our first experience with the Gocco, first I need to set the stage.

Nick and I love homespun wedding details, and so our invitations just had to be handmade. We also wanted to loosely tie our invitations to our Save the Dates and eventually to the rest of our printed elements.

I was introduced to the Gocco via several of the many wedding blogs I read daily. For those of you hearing this word for the first time, let me briefly explain. The Gocco is a compact screen printer made in Japan. Check out these awesome Gocco’d goods on Flickr.

The Gocco seemed like a great way to make our prints extra special. And I knew they were hard to find, so I jumped at the opportunity to get one of my own! It arrived perfectly packed with extra screens, bulbs, and inks (thanks, Amy I!). And there it sat – still perfectly packed – on my living room floor.

I had no time to experiment and no concrete idea of how we were going to use it. Instead I moved forward with the steps I felt comfortable with.

We effortlessly crafted our invitation wording. We opted for a more informal approach and included our favorite line, “Together we laugh, we dream, we love, and on this day we marry.”

We had a much more difficult time finding the perfect design element to accompany our perfect words. We searched iStockphoto page after page for trees, birds, and a combination of both until we arrived at this lovely one:

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While I am not a believer that wedding favors are necessarily required, I fell completely in love with these cookie bundles tied with manilla shipping tags Kat (AKA Mrs. Cherry Pie) made for her recent Montana wedding and decided to create a version of my own as my first Gocco project after having finally scored a Gocco of my own.

I started out by buying two packages of shipping tags and laying out my design in Illustrator. After some trial and error and asking a lot of questions of Gocco expert in residence, E, I managed to print 200 favor tags in just about 3 hours one evening this past week. I used gold ink paired with the manilla shipping tags and I love how they turned out! Some of the tags were definitely lost in the process, but in the end I have more than enough to bundle up cookies, which I will bake myself the week before the wedding, for our anticipated 150 - 175 guests.

What do you think? Wouldn’t you love to attend a wedding and find a little bundle of homemade treats waiting for you at your seat? I know I would!

Cyd and Nole were both in a Gocco mood today so I thought I’d join in!  Angelique created these absolutely fabulous Gocco save the dates - she printed on wood laminate cards and encased them in gorgeous fabric pouches.

YES - you can Gocco on wood.  Or tin (using the hand-stamp tool).  Or glass (using glass etching cream instead of ink).  I’d hazard a guess that if you can find a porous or sealable surface, this miracle of a machine can print on it!

{Tutorial found here}