My first wedding project was to stamp napkins. Of course, I didn’t just want to buy a stamp and do it that way. No. I needed to buy a Print Gocco. I’d been scouring the internets for one, and low-and-behold, one came up for sale in my city. Of course, I snapped it up. These are the instructions:

I had already taken apart the elements of our monogram in illustrator, so I needed to create “the master” – I printed the elements I wanted to “burn” to the screen on the laser printer at work. Something about carbon. I lined up the graphics with the screen, very carefully:

I loaded the mercury filled flash bulbs into the bulb holder, I asked my fiancee to video tape for good measure, and I pressed down really hard to burn the screen.

Once I had burned the screen, peeled the paper away and admired it, I set work on my napkins. First, I used washi tape to mark out a template so I would always put the napkin in the right spot. Then, I printed the heart first, in pink, and let them all dry:


After all of the hearts had time to dry, I moved the ink block around the outline of the monogram, and filled it black ink. Then I set my mind to printing 100 napkins, again. I think they turned out pretty good!

…T