Vicky Yorke Designs

  The 'Partridge & Pear' designs are continued across a number of festive porcelain platters, which are ideal for serving your Christmas feasts! I think that the heart-shaped platters below would also work well as a trinkets tray - I'm going to get one to put my jewellery in! However, perhaps the more traditional use for the bowls is for figs and nuts! My favourite product in the range is the cake stand, where the heart and dove motifs are combined to very decorative effect. (I love combining patterns together for a pattern overload!) I'm looking forward to using this for my Christmas cupcakes and mince pies! Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2012

As we move through the first week of August I have been extremely busy designing my THIRD Christmas range for 2013. This is the sixth Christmas range I have designed in twelve months ( - it's lucky I love Christmas so much!) and all of the ranges are completely different, focusing on very contrasting styles and themes. Among my favourite ranges is ' Partridge & Pear , ' which was launched by Kitchen Craft at Exclusively Housewares . I am a big fan of Scandinavian / folk style prints and I hope that these designs capture this essence. Inspired by the trend for paper cut-outs and following the range name of 'Partridge & Pear', I designed a series of motifs, (heart, turtle dove, pear and partridge) and applied these boldly across the product range. I used a limited colour pallet of red, white and silver to create a dramatic effect. These work as a design for Christmas, but because of the current trend for folk designs, I personally think they could be used

As mentioned in previous posts, designing the 'Christmas Fayre' range presented many challenges! I hadn't worked a lot with metal before, so creating these cake tins was a real joy! Once I had worked out where the graphics should be placed for best effect, working with the flat sides of the tins was relatively easy and I have been delighted with how beautifully my illustrations and colours have reproduced. Perhaps more of a challenge was creating metal cookie cutters from my drawings, as it was necessary to simplify my drawings to their most basic form, while still keeping a shape that is distinctly recognisable as one of my motifs when the cookie is created. As well as being used in the baking set featured in my last post, the cookie cutters will be available to buy on a metal ring. I was given the challenge of creating a Christmas tree that will be displayed in stores for point of sale and that the cutters can hang from like decorations! With some help from Kitch

Christmas is a time when everyone seems to love baking - even I have been known to put on an apron and attempt a batch of mince pies during the festive period! The 'Christmas Fayre' range has everything needed to make baking with the kids ( or on your own!) really easy and fun! There is a baking kit containing a red mixing bowl, (which has my design embossed all the way round), cookie cutters and a spatula. Separate sets of fun Christmas spatulas featuring my design motifs are also available. The apron is one of my favourite products in the range. You can't quite see in the photo but the pockets have super-cute button detailing, which is combined with a fuller than normal apron skirt to create a quirky 1950's style. The matching oven mitt completes the designer look!!! And when all the baking is finished there are even tea towels to help you finish the washing up - Or, you could just put everything in the dishwasher and use the tea towels to add a dash of fe

The ceramic products that I designed for 'Christmas Fayre' have been amongst the most challenging and exciting! As a surface pattern designer I work in 2D, but as a product developer I have to be able to imagine my finished product in 3D and provide accurate drawings and instructions to help factories turn my concepts into reality. My design process nearly always begins with hand drawing. For 'Christmas Fayre', I scanned my drawings into Adobe Illustrator and converted them into vector files for the factories to use; however, for the salt and pepper set and napkin rings pictured above I had to provide accurate drawings of the sides, top and bottom as well - pretty tricky when designing on paper! The factories have done an amazing job of interpreting my drawings and I couldn't be more pleased with these finished products - all of which, incidentally, are painted by hand! For the ceramic mug and plates I chose areas of the designs to emboss, so that the ch

The life of a surface pattern designer and product developer can be quite confusing. Here I am in mid-July 2012 sitting watching the rain and wondering if summer will ever actually arrive... but at the same time I am in a Christmas head-space, as I have to work so far in advance I have design deadlines for Christmas 2013 projects due at the end of the month! If that isn't confusing enough Kitchen Craft have just launched my two tabletop Christmas ranges for 2012 , ready for stores to buy in stock in time for this Christmas... The ranges were launched at Exclusively Housewares last month and I have already given you a sneaky peak at 'Partridge & Pear', so I thought I would start today by showing you my fun and quirky interpretation of the Christmas theme, 'Christmas Fayre'. Inspiration for this range came from the fun and happiness that Christmas brings and of course the yummy food that we all enjoy! Using the gingerbread man as the 'star' of the de