Wedding Blog

I recently completed the dreaded task of learning how to use my Gocco. I bought the thing months ago, and until recently, it’s just been collecting dust on our guestroom floor. However, I got inspired to do a trial run to make cards for my two flower girls. The girls already know I want them to be flower girls (and they are very excited about it!), but I wanted to send them “Will you be my flower girl?” cards anyway. I still regret not doing something special for my bridesmaids—at the time I picked them, I had not yet discovered there was a protocol for asking your best pals to be your ’maids. Ah, well.

My two lovely FGs are my cousin’s two daughters—they’re five and six years old and way too cute for words. I know that they recently got to go to Disney World, and while there they got princess makeovers. They loved it, so I wanted to make cards for them that were inspired by this princess theme.

I know that in the past I have heard that there are great Gocco tutorials on YouTube and Flickr. But for some reason until now I was too lazy to go and find them. So for all you would-be-crafters out there, I am embedding the video tutorials, parts one and two, that I found particularly helpful in using my B6 Gocco. I’m pretty sure the PG-5 works similarly.

I haven’t yet decided if the 1980s employee training music is so bad it’s good, or so bad it’s bad, but at any rate, the videos are mega-useful. They seriously break it down for you. One thing I would add to the videos is that you have to put two AA batteries into your Gocco before it will burn a screen! They go in the top part where the handle is.

Because this was sort of a practice round for me (and because it was late at night and I didn’t have access to a copier), I started by making my original print using the Riso pen that comes with every Gocco machine. I typed “Will you be my flower girl” in Word and picked out a font I thought was cute. It’s called Handwriting-Dakota. Then, I found some free clip art by doing a Google image search. I found a sketch drawing of a tulip that went well with the handwriting. I printed out the text and the tulip (on opposite sides and ends of a piece of printer paper) and traced them with the Riso pen, one at a time, onto another piece of printer paper that I had cut down to fit in the Gocco. Here’s what it looked like after I finished tracing.

I made a master copy by following the video tutorials, and then placed two colors of ink on the master—the two colors didn’t bleed at all despite the fact that the text and the flower were pretty close together on the master.

I did a few “practice” printings, and they came out great, for the most part. The cardstock I was using had a linen texture on the front, and that tended to blur the ink a bit. I tried printing on the smoother backside, which worked better. Finally, I decided to print on some velum that I got from Michaels–it is white with opal dots. The result was amazing! Perfect printing. I decided to print the cards on the velum, and then pasted that onto the pale pink linen textured cardstock.

I used tacky glue to attach the velum to the cardstock–probably not the best idea, but it’s all I had. Luckily it ended up drying clear and pretty smooth.

Finally, I attached some self-adhesive pastel rhinestones that I also picked up at Michaels all over the cards for a sparkly, princess look.

I didn’t buy envelopes because I’m also making gifts for the girls (I will blog about those soon!), so I’ll just put the cards in the package along with the gifts. I can’t wait for my two adorable flower girls to get their presents!

How did you ask your flower girl(s) to be a part of your wedding party?