I’ve been working on this project for awhile now but I finally finished it! Huzzah!

Here is the rad vinyl ottoman I bought on my very first thrifting trip in high school. Clearly, I hang onto things! My high school self painted on pretty much everything in her room, so… of course—the ottoman was also painted. First with some acrylics and then sloppily with some bright blue spray paint. Now I totally wish I hadn’t because check out the amazing mustard color it was underneath!

Before!

I have been knitting a cover out of lots of different random wool yarn that I had in my stash. It’s a slightly mod-podge cobbled look but it works for our home. I knitted a cover to match the dimensions of the ottoman, basing the pattern off of the Felted Boxes pattern from Mason Dixon knitting because it has some clever construction details that help the cover to hold it’s boxy shape.

Materials!

After knitting the fabric & seaming it into it’s proper cube shape, I threw the cover in the washer to felt a bit. I wanted to solidify the fabric a bit more and felting seemed to do the trick rather nicely. I blocked the cover on the actual ottoman (hooray for vinyl!) and then stapled all along the bottom edge. I started at the center of each side & worked my way to the corners, taking care to fold them neatly down prior to stapling the heck out of it.

Multi-angled love

& voila— in action, my newly knitted ottoman.

After

Some of my older Gocco prints.

Print Gocco! is an amazing little Japanese screenprinter which is sadly no longer produced. I’ve had mine since 2005 (and have luckily ferreted a decent amount of supplies away) but you can still find them on ebay! I don’t use it very frequently (I think the last time I used it was 2008! For shame!) but have been meaning to bust it out and have some fun. You can see some of my previous results in the photo above. Let’s get to it.

My Materials

So I have my stack of cards (from Paper Source); my original art (skulls!); a screen; some RISO metallic ink; 2 RISO flash bulbs; & last but certainly not least, the Print Gocco B6 Model (the shiny silver part if the flash hood; the blue part is the actual press).

Making my screen

It’s important that your original artwork is a high resolution (300dpi+) and high contrast (black and white!). It’s also equally important that your original artwork is printed with toner—do not use an inkjet! Once you have the art lined up how you want it, you place your flashbulbs in the hood and attach the hood to the body of the Print Gocco (Fig B). To make the screen, you simply press down firmly on the handle and FLASH BANG! The lights pop (one use only—sadness! See Fig DEF) and your screen has been burned. Generally, your original will be stuck to your screen after the burning process (Fig C). I always think of it as a good thing because it means that the burn was successful!

Used flash bulbs

Screen Pre-Inking

I think the screen is really neat. You can clearly see where the toner has “burned through” the screen on all the places that were black. All the area that were white on the original are solid & shiny so the ink cannot seep through.

Inking the Screen

Let’s ink this bad boy! You can see in Fig H that there is a little plastic film that flips over one side of your screen. You want to sandwich the ink in between the plastic film & your screen—this ensures that the ink only presses out on one side & doesn’t get all over your little printer! You only really need to ink the black parts of the design but because this particular design is ink heavy, I ended up inking the entire screen (and using a palette knife to smoosh any extra ink into the right place).

Fitting the Screen

To fit the screen into the machine’s body after inking you have to gently bend the screen/frame to fit in the slots on the top half of the press (Fig J-M). The plastic film side faces your machine & the open screen size faces your printing plate!

Making a print

Let’s make a print! Place card (or paper product of your choice) on the printing plate (Fig N); make sure it’s straight (if you want it straight anyway!). Press the screen down (Fig O). Your printed object will most likely stick to the screen (Fig P). You want to be extra careful when you’re peeling it away from the screen—images smudge/smear and lose their crispness if you aren’t mindful (Fig Q). And tada! we have a print (Fig R).

Drying time!

And then you print madly on whatever you have lying around (I tend to have a collection of blank cards from Paper Source’s sale rack and leftovers from other projects—those orange cards look familiar…) and lay out to dry. I let all mine dry over night. I find that my stacking cookie racks are incredibly useful when I have a high volume of printed pieces drying rather than spreading them out over any flatish surface in our apartment.

Potential upcoming prints!

Who’s next? I am thinking the keys are the next up for printing. What do you think?
You can purchase any of the skull prints from my etsy shop!

Want more Gocco?!
Save Gocco
Etsy Labs did a tutorial too!
Flickr’s Gocco group
A company called Northwoods Studios carries a lot of gocco supplies!
DIY Life on Print Gocco

Let's Make Stuff: Yakkity Yak.

Hooray! A tutorial! While not an entirely useful item, it’s certainly a fun one! Let’s make a Yakkity Yak bubble to hang on the wall.

Continued…

Julie & Scott get hitched.

I think this was the most enjoyable part about wedding planning (other than tasting cupcakes, of course!).

Scott & I have fairly different aesthetics so it was a fun challenge to mesh them together. Obviously, I lean towards the retro-adorable side and he leans more toward modern-awesome.

More invitation goodness after the jump! Continued…

mini-hack with floral wrapping paper

It’s really not much of a hack. Behold, the Billy bookcase.  Yes, IKEA, I will purchase the white one because it costs half of what every other color does ($25 vs. $50—for colors?!).

Steps:

1. Lay paper on the floor, face down.  Place back board on top of the paper. Trace your board. I needed to cut a second piece of paper to match up because I wasn’t thinking clearly: Roll your paper out long enough so you can fit the whole board on there at once.

2. Cut your paper.

3. If you’re a crafty pro or have an extra set of hands lying around, use spray adhesive to affix the paper to the board. If you’re making do because you want to get it done now & are impatient like me, grab some double sided tape you’ve got laying around and go to town.

4. Cover with contact paper.

5. Slide & tack your board as you normally would.

The bookcase itself is super easy to put together. Really, I built each of them in about 20 minutes (I bought 3 for storage in all of our new giant closets). I, of course, decided to make it ‘difficult’ on myself & papered the back board prior to sliding it in the groove & tacking the bottom edge. It was only mildly aggravating. It would have been better if I could find all the tools I own (mainly my rotary cutter & spray adhesive).

I purchased wrapping paper from The Container Store, the one pictured & a second pattern of dark brown & light blue. This floral pattern paper, while adorable, was the one that was not-so-great to work with. It was a little slick, a little shiny & a little thin which made it bothersome to tack to the back board without wrinkling. That and the pattern was not an easy repeat to line up. If I had the forethought, I would have just unrolled the paper to the proper length. The other paper was really nice, a decent weight to it & matte. I would try to find these qualities when you’re looking for paper!

All in all: worth it! Takes a plain white bookcase & turns it into something a bit prettier. I will most likely end up attacking all of the bookcases in the house with this technique, much to my husband’s chagrin, I’m sure.

from my flickr stream

Finished objects!

The gluing of wire to stem was actually not the most annoying part of these. That was annoying simply because I lack the patience to wait for glue to dry. The next step in construction was a little painful in a different way. The muscle in the meat of my hand was cramping up as I was pinching the stems together & wrapping them with floral tape. If my hand hadn’t cramped up, it most likely would have been a breeze. I would definitely recommend the kit to anyone who might have had an inkling to try it. The instructions are clear and it’s really not all that difficult. If I were going to purchase another kit, however, I would definitely go with the smaller size. The Giant Magnolia kit flowers did turn out quite pretty though.

And then there were my own original attempts of construction without a kit for the centerpieces at the wedding.

Continued…

From my flickr stream

I don’t often delve into paper craft. Not anything with glue anyway. Or trimming really (I can’t cut straight to save my life). Cranes, yes. Cards printed with a Gocco, yes. Cutting up bits of paper & gluing it all together…not so much.

I am planning on making a bunch of paper flowers for our April wedding (I love how they look & how much they cost). I bought a kit from Papersource just for testing purposes; to understand how they structured theirs so I could decide how to modify it for production on a much larger scale. Turns out Papersource adorable paper flowers are a pain in the ass. But I bet it’s going to look dang pretty when they’re done.

The pattern is relatively clear though I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to use a full length of the wire per petal OR cut it in half. So I cut them in half, at least for this one flower.

Papersource suggests this stuff as a gluing agent. But I decided to go to JoAnn’s & grab some ModPodge. Truth be told, I’ve never used Mod Podge before. Ever. But I’ve always (ever since I can remember anyway) coveted it. For some reason, in my six-year-old head, it was the end-all-be-all of crafty gooeyness. I guess I will see if I was right when those petals finish drying. I’ll be following up this post with a finished product shot and more muddling madness soon.