Prince Street Raffle Tickets

Every year the Prince Street Home and School holds a Christmas raffle to raise money. And every year for the past 5 years I’ve volunteered to produce the tickets; for the last three years it’s been a good opportunity to take the letterpress out for a ride. This year, partly because I was running out of time, and partly because of design inclination, I decided to go very simple:

If I had to do it all over again, I would have realized that when I flipped the “Phone:” and “Name:” around to face the other way (to let me slip a piece of steel under the perforation) their order was reversed. The perforation really is a perforation, and this was the first time I’d set up a job to print and perforate at the same time.

The type is the 24 point Bodini Bold I purchased from Atelier Domino in the spring. My favourite part of the job was the opportunity to use the ffl ligature — a ligature is a special piece of type that combines several letters that would otherwise run together unpleasantly, and most often involves the letter f — in the word Raffle (apologies for the obviously-not-cleaned-enough type!):

The tickets didn’t technically require numbers, but, well, I like using my numbering machine, if only because it’s just a lovely piece of technology: on every impression the number automatically increments, and the “No” is the trigger for this:

When you put it all together it looked like this:

It took me about an hour to run 300 tickets; it would have gone faster but I stopped the press every 30 tickets to carry a bunch of tickets across the room to set out to dry. I’m rather pleased with the result.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow, December 8, 2012 at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market (next to Lori and John’s perogi stand); you can also buy them at the Prince Street School Christmas concerts on December 10 and 12, and then again at the Market on December 15; the draw is at 2:00 p.m. on December 15 at the Market. Tickets are $2 each or three for $5.