Matt and I try to make a holiday card every year. Since we wanted to share copies of photos from the wedding with family and friends, we need to make a lot of cards this year. Lucky for me, Matt gave me a Gocco for my birthday and I had been waiting to try it. I should say, he gave me a Gocco for my birthday two years ago… but, you know when you have something special and limited supplies you wait to use it for something special… Anyways, it was a lot of fun to pull it out and learn how to use it.

We started with the idea of using a paper cut out snowflake that had the word Peace cut out of the middle… you can see it evolved quite a bit. Matt made a few snowflakes of different sizes that we scanned and used Photoshop to do a simple layout. I handwrote peace in the bottom corner.

Gocco works by creating a screen using a flash bulb. You then apply your inks and print to paper – it is actually pretty simple. Unfortunately supplies are no longer made, but you can find them on ebay and other online shops. Save Gocco is a great resource for learning more about the process, as well as seeing some fantastic projects others have made with their Goccos.

Here it is after printing.

The white and gray ink on the blue paper was nice and subtle – just what I would expect a snowflake to look like. In the end it took us a few hours, but it was a lot of fun and felt very productive. We needed around 100 cards for mailing, but we ended up with maybe four times that… This super fuzzy photo is just to give you a shot of our total card making process!

Eventually we ran out of paper, the screen started to degrade which caused the ink to run, and we lost our steam. I did post a set of extras to Etsy… we have quite a few! I’ll be bundling them as sets for gifts next year, too. If anyone reading this is interested in a set, leave me a comment and I will be happy to share with a few lucky readers!

Peace!