Weddingbee Blog

My friend Kathy got married last year and had a beautiful wedding. Kathy is super funny, and one of her great ideas cracked me up: she decided to have cocktail napkins printed with funny facts about she and her husband-to-be. Tragedy struck, however, when they arrived one day AFTER her wedding. Stupid napkin people.

Thanks to Kathy’s genius idea and my decision not to trust anyone but myself (which is surely a serious psychological problem), I will now have custom napkins at my wedding. And so will my friend Amanda. Why? Because this weekend we used a gocco for the first time ever to print fun facts on 1300 napkins. 650 for Amanda, 650 for me.

I am not going to lie, I was a little bit (okay, a lot bit) terrified of the gocco. Tons of people have used them and raved about them. They even say that the gocco is an easy machine to use. But it looked complicated to me. I mean, you have to flash these bulbs, and I don’t get how the screen works, and all the instructions are in Japanese! How easy could this possibly be?!

The answer, my friends, is VERY easy. Well, except for the bulb part. That part takes some getting used to.

So here, in pictures, is our adventure with the gocco.

This is me, trying to arrange my fun facts in order to burn the screen. Please do not ask me how this works. I really have no idea. Actually, I am pretty sure it’s magic. So I didn’t ask any deep questions about magic or science–all I did was follow the video I found online from Paper Source.

Burning the screen requires putting some weird bulbs (my manager told me they’re carcinogenic, which is why we’re outside–sorry, squirrels) in the top of the machine and then pushing down on the machine to make them flash. For some reason, this process terrified me. Probably for the same reason I really don’t like popping balloons–I really don’t like loud noises or bright flashes. I was convinced it would be very bright because Sue (the woman in the video) acts very surprised when her bulbs flash.

As it turns out, it was neither loud nor very bright. Although, Amanda looks very surprised for some reason!

Okay. So our first trial with the ink did NOT go well. In fact, we both nearly freaked out and thought we were gocco failures. The ink was sort of bleeding all over the napkin, and half the words didn’t even print. It was not legible. Then we noticed that the black ink tube said, “for fabric.” Long story short, Amanda was concerned about this when she bought the ink, but the guy at the store told her it would be fine. As you can see, it was not fine:

So we decided to try the other thing of ink we bought, which was red. It was all in Japanese, so we had no idea if it would work on paper or fabric, or neither. As it turns out, it works on paper:

And it is BEAUTIFUL! We were so proud of ourselves! We promptly made tons of napkins. Here’s beautiful Amanda with the gocco and many, many napkins:

All in all, this project cost us each about $50 in gocco supplies and napkins. When all is said and done, we both had 8 facts and 650 napkins. Lucky for me, I was able to borrow Paper Source’s gocco for this project, so we didn’t have to invest in one. Sadly for me, at 9am yesterday morning one of my co-workers told me that Paper Source has the gocco for sale again, and I promptly dropped about $200 bucks on a gocco and a bunch of supplies. Oops. So I guess this project cost me a teensy bit more than $50! Oh well, there are many wonderful years of printing ahead of me. Right? Right?

When I got home, I put all of my napkins in a water-proof tupperware for safe keeping. And there they will sit for the next 3.5 months. High five!

And for all the Negative Nellies out there, yes, I did check to make sure that the ink will not wipe all over my guest’s faces when they use them. And no, they will not give anyone cancer.