Weddingbee Blog

For a while, we thought we’d use gable boxes to hold welcome items for our out-of-town guests. Then, the fabulous Miss Sundae wrote about finding inexpensive canvas tote bags, and we swiftly changed our minds. Giving our guests bags that they could actually reuse sounded like a really cool idea, so we decided to go for it too.

The bags that Miss Sundae found were a little more expensive by the time I got around to buying them, so I found some similar 15″ x 16″ natural cotton tote bags from InGreetings.com for $0.94 a pop (now available for $0.98 each). The material was fairly thin, but overall we were impressed with the quality for the price. There were some slight variations in size from bag to bag, but other than that we didn’t have any problems, and delivery was very prompt.

I set to work trying to create a design for our bags that wouldn’t scream “THIS IS FROM OUR WEDDING” but instead would hopefully be something that people would reuse.

We eventually settled on an image of a tandem bike (it says “love” without being too schmoopy, no?), which I of course found on iStockPhoto.com, my go-to source for all of the images that I don’t have time to illustrate myself. Thank you, iStock!

To complete our design, I included a line from our first dance song (it says “Love is all about ‘we’”) and in the bottom right I added “B+N | 09.20.08,” just large enough to read. To print the design I ordered Versatex fabric ink in teal, thanks to Miss Candy Corn’s recommendation.

The photocopied design (I printed a few, just in case) and Gocco supplies

All ready to flash the master

Once the master was flashed, blocked and all inked up, I set to work testing things out on one canvas bag… and, well, things were not looking good.

As you can see, the heavy coverage needed on the wheels of the bike combined with non-Riso Gocco ink did not bode well for me. Apparently, Versatex ink is a little thinner than Riso ink and it makes it difficult to get consistent ink coverage with a Gocco after the first impression. However, this little Cupcake was determined to make this work. After a handful of test runs, it became obvious that for adequate ink coverage, I would need to re-ink the screen before each impression (or at least, re-distribute the ink to be consistent across the whole image). We only had 65 bags (which were more than enough for our overnight guests) so I thought it wouldn’t be a big project. Well, it turned out to be bigger than expected. This “little project” ended up taking me a good four hours! In the end, though, I have to say that the bags look awesome, and I am really, really proud of them.

My first successful impression

All lined up to dry

Because the canvas bags are fairly thin, I put a piece of regular text-weight copy paper inside of each bag before Gocco’ing on it to prevent the ink from running onto the back of the tote bag. This is definitely a necessity if you are printing on thin bags. I removed all of the copy paper the next day after I was sure everything was 100% dry.

Is anyone else customizing OOT tote bags? How are you personalizing them?