Gocco me baby

When I was in college, I knew I wanted to do something with art. I didn't really know what that would entail and when it came closer to having to pick an actual major, I somehow landed on Textile Design with a concentration in printed design. This means that I am skilled (or should be skilled) in creating silk screen prints, not the t-shirt kind that you find at your local mall kiosks but rather the floral printed bedspread that you have in your home. This process, at least the way I learned it, is complex and time consuming, especially when its done by hand. Each color of the design has a new screen that has the "white space" blocked out so that it doesn't print. The blocking out that I know of, means that me and a paintbrush have some very long tedious sessions for each different screen.

For a long time, I thought about how I could combine the screen printing with invitation design and could never bring myself to test it out, knowing how time consuming something like that would be. Enter Gocco.

I feel like I've been living under some sort of rock about Gocco. I mean, it was created in the 1970's but a whole onslaught of people are just discovering it and all its glory. Its a dream come true for someone who created this style of work BY HAND!

What is it you ask?
"Print Gocco is a tabletop silk-screen unit which requires no chemicals, no darkroom, no big unwieldy wooden frames. With Gocco, you can print several colors at once without a separate screen for each color." (Source: http://northwoodstudios.tripod.com/whatisgocco.html)
{image from Flickr user Sarah Parrott}

The result is unique and very handcrafted in feel. Its versatile in the fact that, you can print light colors on darker colors or use metallic inks, which is unmatched in standard flat printing, with the exception of offset lithography.

So its in the works here at Creative Montage to at some point add Gocco printing to our options for printing of save the dates and invitations...what do you think? We'd love to hear your thoughts so please leave us some love!