Gocco

It's been a long while since I have broken out my gocco printer and made something, like these cards. If you have never seen or heard of a gocco machine, it's a compact machine that is similar to screen printing. You take an image and burn it into a screen by using the flash of a special light bulb. The screen (with the image on it) is inserted into the gocco machine along with a piece of paper. Simply squeegee some ink across the screen and print your image when the ink penetrates the area that was burned onto the screen. I used to make handmade wedding invitations in this manner, printing each invitation individually. But gocco equipment has been discontinued and the ink and lightbulbs are now hard to come by. So I save them for special projects, like these cards. This tree is a versatile design because I sell it as is in the winter as bare trees. I add some paint to them, hand-painted on with a sponge, to make autumn trees with bursts of orange, red and yellow. I use a gold or silver pen to add little shiny balls for the holidays. There are some images and designs that are universal and everyone buys. A tree is one of those images.

I love printing solid images on old book pages for a really interesting card, and used the same image for this custom order of cards. Paired with a kraft brown envelope, these cards have a completely different feel.