We have finished designing the 2011 Maraid Christmas cards – a set of three bright and happy designs. All we have to do now is wait for them to come back from the printers!

When travelling it’s those small differences to home that catch my eye. I was impressed by the beauty of Norwegian manhole covers. I loved the way they are designed specifically for that town or area. During our visit to Ålesund we were promised beautiful art nouveau buildings but the street design underfoot was much more impressive.

1. Ålesund, 2. Røvær Island, 3. Bergen

I picked up several Know the Game books on a recent trip to the Yorkshire Dales. They are British education books giving an illustrated introduction to sports and hobbies. E.P. Publishing covered about 80 subjects, regularly updating them with new content, covers and illustrations to reflect the times.
View the full set on Flickr

I inherited a set of plywood mid-century modern chairs from my Grandparents. I’ve always wondered where they came from and their designer. This week the lovely folks at Firefly House popped by for a meeting and cheeky pint. They kindly tweeted the chairs to see if anyone could enlighten us. Within half an hour Home Spun Vintage had come up trumps with the all the details. I can now confirm they are Neil Morris ‘Bambi’ chairs. Hooray! After a little looking around on the internet I quickly came across these beauties – Toby Arm Chairs – oh dear, I need more space for more chairs.

I’ve made a few unsuccessful Gocco prints since my first one. Its fustrating when it goes wrong – the wasted screens, bulbs, ink and time. But when it goes well its rewarding. Freshly printed are this year’s christmas cards.. the skating chimp.

Things I have learnt in the past few efforts. Always test inks before applying them to the screen – with some of the older inks the oil has separated and comes out the tube first – this made my paper stick to a screen. Don’t put the foam separators too close to the ink area as the will stop it from printing a solid colour. Start designing with the colours you have – I scanned in the tube packaging and made a illustrator swatch palette with the colours so I could easily experiment. I’ve found mixing colours hasn’t worked very well. Yellow hardly shows up on the off-white card I use. More complicated designs look better on screen, more simple ones look better printed.

Prints are available in my Maraid Etsy shop.

On the list of things to do on holiday in Prague, along with the usual tourist attractions, was Terry Posters. Terry Posters sell original Czechoslovakian film posters, many of them vintage. It’s perfectly situated in Světozor Cinema.

When I was finished I had visual overload and my hands hurt from flicking through the racks. It was a joy. We bought five lovely ones from the 1970s. Terry Posters is also online.

Or, I should say, my first successful gocco print.

It had taken me a while to decide to invest in a Gocco printer. Riso, the makers of the Japanese home screen printing kit stopped production in 2005. I eventually took the plunge and purchased PG-11 kit on Ebay from Japan.

My first attempt was frustratingly unsuccessful. To make your master screen Gocco requires you to use a print made from carbon ink. I tried to make my master screen from a photocopy which attached itself after exposure (even using the blue filter). After more internet research it seemed that people had less problems using a laser printer. Following their advice my second attempt was a success.

Advice and lessons learnt

I read quite a lot about people getting patchy prints and not using enough ink. I may have over inked a little and my first design required a lot of coverage. From this I learnt..

It may sound obvious but it can get messy, at least messier than instructional videos may lead you to believe. For the mess have to hand; turps, rags and newspaper.

Ink got past my screen and onto the printer body. I used a philips screwdriver to remove the see-through plastic plate to clean it, using cotton buds (q-tips) to get into the smaller spaces.

Have spare jars for excess ink. Old clean spice jars would be ideal.

The final product

For this first attempt I tried to keep things simple. One screen for the print, using two colours. I am looking forward to experimenting with a two screen print using the PG-11 registration plate.

After seeing my Micheal Lewis of MIKMIK Studios‘ Gocco prints I asked him where to purchase the card that he used (for his beautiful prints). The 250gsm Bier paper is manufactured using a combination of leftovers from the brewing industry: beer labels and malt/yeast/hops fibres. Available from the Green Stationery Company.

Prints are available in my new Maraid Etsy shop.

I’m a little fascinated by British wrestling posters at the moment. I think this one illustrates how fantastic they are.

• British wrestling posters flickr set