Vicky Yorke Designs

As we head towards the festive season, thoughts are really beginning to turn towards Christmas parties and New Year, so this is a perfect time for my final post about my party range design for ' Mix It' , which would make a perfect fun alternative to traditional Christmas party products!  One of my favourite things about this range is the packaging, which was put together by the very clever  artworkers at Kitchen Craft. They took my illustrations and surface patterns and all of the playfulness that I tried to create on product and extended this onto boxes, labels and belly bands to really bring the range together! I particularly love how they have subtly brought my cross-hatch surface pattern into the packaging using a spot UV finish, (which is basically a varnish effect on a matt background).  There are lots of cocktail and party products available in the 'Mix It' range. For more details click here. Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2012. 

The second part of the 'Mix It' brief was to design a complimentary surface pattern that would go with the illustrations, but be separate to them. This needed to be unisex to go across a range of textile and paper product, so I decided to keep it quite simple with a hand drawn cross hatch effect created with a dip pen. I used the acidic colours from the illustrations to pull the two contrasting looks together. The cross-hatch design is available on neoprene bottle bags, bottle coolers and napkins. Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2012.

In addition to 'Lock In', I was asked to design a second range for the Bar Craft brand, which is now known as 'Mix It' . The brief for this range was to create a fun and playful design for a cocktail / party range that would appeal to young adults. There were two parts to the brief. The first part was to create illustrations of products / objects associated with cocktail making, which were to be used on packaging and some of the products. I wanted to create a strong, yet playful look, so turned to my trusty dip pen and ink to create a set of fluid drawings. I love 'accidental' mark making, so embraced all the ink splatters and smudging that tend to form with this type of illustration. This can be seen to best effect on the cocktail coasters, which come in a set of four. I really took these as the starting point for the whole range, using my favourite vibrant and acidic colours to set the party tone! Images copyright Kitchen Cra

This month my designs have once again been showcased by Kitchen Craft on their stand at The Spring Fair (NEC, UK) and Ambiente (Messe Frankfurt, Germany). Thousands of people walk the halls at these prestigious industry shows including buyers from top retailers around the world. It is always a privilege to have designs shown at these exhibitions so I was really upset not to make the shows in person this year due to other design commitments (... more details to follow soon hopefully!), but I was able to get these images from the Kitchen Craft Facebook page. Above is a lovely display of my 'World of Flavours - Chinese' range at Spring Fair, which I showed you in more detail on the blog back in August. Above and in the below shot (left and middle of the Cool Movers stand) is a sneaky peak at my two new summer ranges...! Above is a spooky display of my Halloween range design for 'Spookily Does It' ( - You can read more about this design here ) and below is a

I'm delighted to finally be able to share with you that I have collaborated with  Captivate Brands Ltd.  on a new collection of beautiful licensed mugs.  ' Midwinter' is a selection of designs inspired by the forest with patterns including forest flora, oak leaves, trees and forest animals including foxes, hares and birds. It's a cosy collection that is perfect for transitional interiors between Autumn and Winter with the colour palette making it perfect for Christmas and the festive season too.  I worked closely with Captivate over a number of months to help them select some of my favourite and most on trend designs, and we have teamed these with fashionable shapes to create a fresh and stylish selection of 40 mug designs co-branded under their  Siip Fundamental  collection.  'Contoured' is a collection of continuous line drawings and here fashionable and stylish face illustrations are adorned with flower crowns in honour of female strength and unity. There a

This weekend I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to guest post on the Camelot Fabrics Instagram account. It was so much fun to share my experiences of life as a designer and to get feedback from the sewing and quilting community who will be using my designs for their fabulous creations! I loved it!  But in case you aren't on Instagram I thought I would add some of the posts below so that you can still follow along and get to know me better!  Hi! I’m Vicky Yorke and I’m a surface pattern designer and illustrator living in semi-rural Worcestershire, UK. I’m lucky enough to license my collections with Camelot Fabrics and I’m super-excited to be taking over the Camelot Instagram feed for the next few days so that you can get to know me better and learn more about my life as a designer! Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section under my posts. You can also read about me in more detail on the  Camelot Fabrics blog.  I work in two ways as