Weddingbee boards

I haven't had the greatest experience yet with my Gocco and I was wondering if some of you Gocco experts could help me out.  It all started with the paper.  I fell in love with Stardream Opal paper from Paper Source and bought 75 sheets (silly me since I need at least 79 without any goofs) to print our Save the Dates on.  I burned the screen properly, which resulted in a giant squeal, and was so excited to get started.

I saw a few other bees doing the heat embossing thing with the wet Gocco ink so I decided to go with that.  I printed a few on test sheets before trying it out on the paper with gold metallic ink.  It looked better than I thought after the embossing powder was set and dry. 

First problem, slightly unrelated, I didn't exactly create a template to line up the cards each time which resulted in a very angry me when it came time to print the rest of the text.

Real problem:  I used the Navy/Indigo ink that came with my set (one of the main reasons I bought that particular Gocco) and I began experiencing some really frustrating problems with the ink.  It was never even, EVER.  And I'm not talking about small differences, I'm talking about full on smudges that made the text on at least half of them unreadable.  I tried barely touching the screen to the paper and it still did it.  And anytime I would try and wipe of the excess ink on the back side of the screen, it would smudge so bad that it took almost an entire tree's worth of paper of stamping to get the ink to reset to normal.  Then I could get one good print out of it before it started to fade resulting in more frustration.  When I would go to re-ink the screen, it would start bleeding elsewhere and thus began my 25 year old equivalent of a 3 year old temper tantrum. 

Has anyone experienced this with their Gocco?  Am I doing something wrong?  I tried googling the problem and checking with old Gocco posts here and I haven't been able to find anything.  I know I'm using very fine text but I have seen so many other Gocco invites with script text that turned out beautifully.  And printing on a computer is out since we have an inkjet printer and stardream can only be used with a laser printer.  What's the secret?  Help!

This probably isn't your issue since some of the prints seem to be coming out fine...but...

I've found that some gocco inks aren't as thick as others (I've particularly noticed this with some of their blues).  If the ink is too thin/watery, it tends to blob out of the lines sometimes and make things come out like your smudgy example.  But that ususally happens ALL the time if it happens...not just sometimes.

Thanks guys!

@lemon:  I used a carbon copy.  I printed it from my inkjet printer then made a copy at Kinkos.