DIY: Gocco Invitations

How did I not write about our invitations? Perhaps I blocked them out because they were so. much work. After they left my house I was happy to have them out of sight, out of mind.


Our invites were entirely designed and created by little ol' me (using purchased art...I'm not an artist!). P. bought me a gocco for my birthday so the invites were really my first project using the gocco. I highly recommend practicing a bit more before you create your invites. The gocco isn't hard to use once you get the hang of it, but we burned through several frames and lots o' ink before we figured out how to burn the screens to create clean, crisp pictures on the other side.

Gocco, straight out of the box, with computer tutorial.

There were papers everywhere. Everywhere.

Our invitations had four components. The actual invite, the response card, an info sheet, and the envelope.This image is probably the closest to the actual color of the paper (which came from Paper Source). For the envelope I handwrote a screen using the gocco pen and then printed them so we wouldn't have to handwrite a return address on each envelope. As a sidenote, we no longer live at that address so good luck stalking me there :)

While I wanted to use vintage stamps, that ended up being a cost that I couldn't justify. My way of getting around using the flag stamps (the only stamps available when I was sending out invites), was to use a variety of smaller amount stamps. This involved running around to four post offices who looked at me like I was a crazy person for buying hundreds of 5cent stamps.

Our invitations were simple, using an image from Nikki McClure, one of my absolute favorite artists. The text is in a dark brown color, with gold ink for the image.

Our info cards used two screens: one for the image done in gold ink and another for the text, done in a raspberry color. We intended to have driving directions on the back of this sheet, but for some reason could not get the screen to print clearly so after several ruined screens we just scrapped the idea and stuck directions on the website.


You may notice that on our reply card we didn't really make it clear that people should still write their name if they weren't planning on attending. Several people responded with "no" responses and no names. We had to guess based on postage and process of elimination who those people were. Kind of a pain.

So all in all I really liked how they turned out. They aren't professional. They aren't letter pressed. But they were fairly cheap. For save the dates, all the gocco supplies, paper, and stamps we spent a total of $310.

And, since I'm sure someone will ask, here is our save the date. We made my sister take the pictures of us lying under my parent's apple trees holding blank pieces of paper, but wouldn't tell her why. She thought we were crazy. I added in the text after the fact. We printed them using VistaPrint, with a discount code, and I think we paid around $15 total.


Thanks for all the questions! Keep them coming!