I broke out my Gocco and printed these Moleskine notebooks for everyone on my team at work. I don’t think they all get the Douglas Adams nod, but they appreciated the humor.

I wanted a little extra gift to send to Jane when she and Patrick get home from their wedding (see the guest book post earlier this month). Since she liked the geranium paper, and her wedding shoes are green, I wanted to make note cards that matched the theme. But I can’t draw, I really can’t, so I traced one of the geraniums from the guest book paper and used that for the note card. I’m quite happy with the result, and the color is about perfect with the Moss envelopes from Paper Source.

Since Gocco is all about the multiples, I not only had enough cards for Jane, but for myself as well. And since I had a few challenges getting the full bleed to work (getting ink off the edges of the paper), I cut some of the splotchy ones up into gift tags.

I made a number of book blocks this weekend by sewing sections onto tapes, and I saved all the short bits of linen thread that are left at the end of the sewing to use as ties for the tags.

I was having so much fun with the Gocco the other day that I didn’t want to stop with the inclusion cards, so I made some folded cards using a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge that I took a couple of years ago and converted into black and white line art.

It might go up on Etsy, but not yet. One thing I realized a few weeks ago during the list-something-every-day experiment is that you have to list frequently in every category you want to sell in, because otherwise you’re depending on someone looking at (for example) books to look at your store to buy your cards. So I took down the few gift card/tag postings that I had, because listing something priced at $3.50 multiple times at $0.20 per listing cost more than I would make from the item. I think I need a few more card styles before I start listing in a second category.

You’re probably sick of hearing about my Etsy store experiences by now, but indulge me just a little longer and join me in celebrating the week when the number of sales surpassed the number of items in stock. In fact, I’m now faced with a problem I didn’t consider when I first began selling three months ago: I’m running out of stock!

But instead of making new books, today I’ve been enjoying my newly laid out workspace and playing with my Gocco printer. I sold my old desk on Craigslist this week, and now my studio has just one desk, the giant paper cart, my comfy chaise, and a small drawer unit that I’m using as a side table for the chaise. The middle of the room is a large open area where I can spread stuff out on the floor. The paper cart has enough space to not only leave the paper cutter up there, but to have a workspace beside it, so I set up the Gocco printer there and was able to leave the computer and other works in progress on my desk. When I had two desks in here I usually just had paper stacked on the second desk, so it wasn’t a usable workspace. This is very happy-making!

I have a B6 Gocco printer and I laid in a healthy cache of supplies when it appeared that the manufacturer would no longer support the product. But I rarely use it, mainly because I’m intimidated by the act of drawing something that is worthy of using the precious supplies (not to mention printing multiples thereof).

But Christmas is coming, and maybe I’m thinking about it early enough this year to print some cards.

In the meantime, I’ve turned to Etsy for some Gocco inspiration. The following are a few of the items that impressed me in my search. I am not the artist – click on the images to go to the artist’s Etsy shop.

This is the Butterfly Garden 2 print from TreeTop Studio. I love the simple graphics and the blue-gray color:

This is the Three Trees Make a Forest card from one girl two dogs:

Magic Jelly does a great job of tight registration in her Fox and Flowers print – mine never turn out this well:

The Red Branches and Bird print from Sugarloop really pops:

And more:

• Placemats with red poppies and Aqua Poppies enclosure cards from Michelle Brusegaard
• Zombie Plague Christmas Ornaments from Tina Seamonster (lots of Gocco in her shop)
• I like the trailer image on the Home is Where I Am cards from Two Guitars
• Etsy search for items tagged ‘Gocco’. I only made it through the first 35 or so pages of items!
• UDATED: And how could I forget to search Flickr for Gocco?

A while back I took a Gocco printing class at the San Francisco Center for the Book and I made some artist trading cards (ATCs) for this web site using a photo I took of the Golden Gate Bridge and reduced to line art. Then I stuck the cards in a box and forgot about them, because for a long time this web site was half abandoned, and anyway I don’t often meet up with people to whom I could give the cards.

Then I was thinking of ways to package the stitch markers and came up with this:

If there weren’t already 182 pages of stitch markers on Etsy I’d think about starting up something. The two Etsy shops I looked at both seemed to be doing a brisk business in markers, though, so maybe there’s something to that.