Last night I headed across town in the torrential rain to Craft Central in Clerkenwell. It’s the first time I’ve had the pleasure of visiting this cute space dedicated to ensuring craft and design has a strong future. It’s currently home to printmaking extraordinaire Xtina Lamb from Printed Wonders and the Seaside Sisters and last night she was revealing the magic of Print Gocco to a room full of excited creative gals.
After an intro, some lemonade drinking and cake eating we were invited to take a peek into Xtina’s cabinets of thrifted curiosities so we could get some inspiration to create our artwork.
Most the girls had already come along with prepared artwork (so, so organised!) but I think we all enjoyed looking at the colourful collection of vintage ephemera.
I really, really need this Mickey Mouse chair in my life.
Xtina explained to us the best way to prepare artwork for creating our mesh screen on a Print Gocco. Imagery needs to be very clear – using a photocopier is good. Another little tip involved ironing our print outs to remove carbon from large masses of black artwork to get a better result.
Once our artwork was ready and tested it was time to make our screens.
It’s best to use a high mesh master for detailed artwork like Julia’s sweet little row of love birds.
I love the packaging design on the Print Gocco light bulbs, but was taken aback that the bulbs can only be used once to expose one screen. Xtina has recently purchased a thermal imager for when the Print Gocco consumables run out as they’re no longer being manufactured and can only be bought on the second hand market.
Once we’d made our screens it was time to tidy our work stations and prepare to print!
Xtina provided allsorts of things for us to print onto including notebooks, envelopes, card, bunting and tote bags! In no time at all the room erupted into a printing powerhouse.
It was lovely to meet some Twitter folk at the workshop including Katie from the pretty blog What Katie Does. Her logo looked splendid on notebooks and cards.
I printed a white doily style heart onto some deadstock 1970s cotton tees I thrifted last weekend.
I had a really fun evening and left the workshop with an armful of printed goodies and a new massive crush on Print Gocco. Xtina has more workshops planned and you can find out all about them here. She was an ace tutor and answered all the questions being fired at her from every direction and had more tips about how to print with a Gocco than you thought possible. I give a double thumbs up. Righty-ho, I’m off to stalk Gocco’s being sold on eBay………………
Oh my! I have been curious about the wonders of Gocco for a while and seeing y’all in action at the Craft Central/Printed Wonders workshop has set me reeling with jealousy. I’ll be sure to look up Craft Central and hopefully I might manage along to one of Xtina’s workshops in the future 🙂 We sell her work at The Maisonette – our customers LOVE it. Your tshirts are super cute!
Ha, I just blogged it too! Was lovely to meet you last night, your tees look great.