A little of my history
I’ve been involved in computers and DTP (desktop publishing) for around 30 years now. In the mid-90s, my husband Brian and myself were running a small annual Pagan gathering in the North of England. It was proving expensive, so we hit on a plan to raise some cash by publishing our own little quarterly magazine. Called The Little Red Book, it carried articles, cartoons, news and ads. To save money we printed it ourselves (just sending the pages to a printer for binding). Our ‘printshop’ was in a corner of the living room and the equipment consisted of a second-hand IBM PC (with a then-massive 4 megabytes of memory) and a big inkjet printer. For software, we had a cheap Windows DTP program called Serif PagePlus. Word got around and we were soon printing flyers, booklets and books.
And that’s how the first iteration of Oakleaf Design & Print came about.
I took to computing straight away; it was the first time in my life I’d found something I was really good at. I enrolled in part-time IT classes; there I learned how to build my own PC from scratch, as well as how to fix common computer bugs and errors. I also took a couple of programming courses, then started teaching myself web design. My first sites were simple HTML/CSS/PHP affairs until winter 2003/4, when WordPress came along; I’ve used it for most sites ever since.
Astrology has always been an interest; I was editor of the Astrological Association’s Transit magazine for five years, and webmaster for the Association from 2012 – 2021. My last job for them was as one of the 3-person team that converted the elderly HTML site – 200+pages with a shop and a members-only section – to WordPress.
In 1998, I was recruited by Caroline Heaney to help with her Elfin Diary – writing and sourcing content, laying out pages and producing print-ready copy as well as designing and running the website. Caroline died in 2011, bequeathing the Elfin Diary to me (you can read the whole story here). I published the Elfin Diary until 2022, barely managing to get the 2023 edition completed and printed before November. That was because of increasingly poor health for me and the illness and eventual death of my husband. There was no chance of carrying on any kind of work during that dark period, so Oakleaf Design & Print got put to one side.
Until now, when I’m ready to start it all over again!