If you think knitting is just for jumpers and scarves, you’ve clearly never met Kate Jenkins.

The Brighton artist has knitted Pot Noodles and jars of Marmite, self-portraits and magazine covers – even a life-sized sheep.

Her latest project is a series of 52 pun-tastic fish, one for every week of the year.

There’s the bequiffed Elfish Presley, a regal Prince of Whales, a “smoked” salmon complete with smouldering cigarette. She drew the line at the suggestion she make Stevie Flounder: “That doesn’t even rhyme!”

The first question for a woman who spends her days knitting food may well be “Why?”, to which Jenkins would reply, “Why not?”

Despite her serious exterior – when we meet she is dressed in head-to-toe black – she has a wry sense of humour and a boundless curiosity: “I love looking at a spool of wool and wondering what it might become.”

A successful textiles designer, Jenkins started her career working for high fashion names including Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan after graduating from the University of Brighton with a degree in fashion textiles.

She began making knitted artwork as a quirky promotional tool when, in 2003, she launched her label Cardigan, through which she sells her beautiful knitted wraps, scarves and toys.

She had just moved into studios in Arundel Mews, Kemp Town, and decided to lure buyers in by creating a “café” serving up knitted versions of classic British dishes for the annual Artists’ Open Houses event.

The public loved it and, before long, Jenkins found herself crocheting a garden, knitting a range of furnishings for a room in the city’s Hotel Pelirocco and conjuring a dazzling collection of knitted butterflies and bugs for Liberty of London.

In The Illustrated Recipe, a group exhibition with artists including old friend (and fellow Brighton design luminary) Sarah Arnett, the artists set themselves the challenge of illustrating historic recipes in their respective mediums.

Jenkins contributed a crocheted boar’s head.

A to-scale, knitted Champagne bottle is propped up in a corner of her studio – a leftover from a knitted dinner party.

“I love the challenge,” she explains.

“I think anything can be made from yarn as long as it is created with love. And people love suggesting ideas for what I should make next.”

Jenkins was commissioned to make a piece for footwear designer Charlotte Olympia, whose love of lime pickle was reflected in a knitted jar of the condiment, the Sharwood’s logo replaced with “Charlotte’s”.

Other famous fans include Jamie Oliver, Alan Carr and Ricky Gervais’s partner Jane Fallon.

Humour underpins all of Jenkins’s work; her French Toast, created for a solo exhibition in New York earlier this year, wears a beret and Breton stripes; a hand with five sequinned fish attached is titled Fish Fingers.

She had hoped to slip a little joke into a recent commission for the Weald and Downland Museum near Chichester.

The museum wanted a piece that would promote the South Downs and had told Jenkins it could be a little bit mischievous.

She made a woolly, life-sized sheep adorned with lots of smaller sheep, some of whom were, erm, behaving rather amorously.

Sadly, it was vetoed in favour of the entirely respectable version that hangs in the museum today (as pictured above).

She often collaborates with Brighton’s Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, the cartoonists behind cult comic Modern Toss, who commissioned her to make a knitted homage to the comic for their 2008 Museum of Modern S***-Naks.

They later put on a shared exhibition on Brighton seafront, a delightful juxtaposition of Jenkins’s homely knitted designs for Cardigan and Modern Toss’s subversive satire. “They had a few complaints about that show,” she grins.

Born and raised in South Wales, Jenkins was taught to knit by her gran at an early age and found she had a natural aptitude for it.

She has never written patterns for her designs and isn’t one for planning.

“I literally ‘draw’ with wool,” she explains.

“I get an idea in my head and just start making it.

“I do everything by hand even though I know I should probably start using a computerised knitting machine to free up some time.

“I put some music on and just get lost in the rhythm of it.”

What does she listen to while she’s knitting and purling?

“All sorts. I’m quite into my hip-hop and I love The Clash.”

It’s a brilliant image – this grannyish tradition reinvented to a punk soundtrack.

But of course knitting is among the many traditional crafts to undergo a hipster revival of late.

“Oh, people always say that,”

scoffs Jenkins.

“I think it’s always been popular. But there’s definitely been a surge of interest in crafting generally.

I think it’s great.

There’s nothing better than making something from scratch.”

These days she travels all over the world working for a diverse range of clients.

She has just completed a large-scale piece for an insurance company – an illustration destined for a 22ft billboard in New York – and is in the middle of creating a knitwear collection for high street retailer Topman.

She hopes to make her collection of fish (about to go on show at Brighton’s annual art fair, Made) into a book.

Other potential projects include a knitted collection of iconic album covers – “Only good bands,” she is at pains to point out.

“I won’t be recreating any Coldplay.”

It’s this diversity that keeps her work fresh, she says.

“I truly love my job because every day is totally different.

“I have an addictive personality and I always want to get on to making the next thing.

“I don’t think I could stop even if I wanted to.”

* Kate Jenkins is exhibiting at Made Brighton, which runs until November 24 in Brighton Dome Corn Exchange. Visit www.brighton-made.co.uk.

For more information on Kate Jenkins and her work visit www.cardigan.ltd.uk.