text: LONDON — Nearly five years ago, the textile designer Helen Chatterton was searching for a way to celebrate London. She had been fashioning men’s and women’s scarves with materials like tweed from Scotland and velvet from France but needed a way to create pieces with more of a London DNA for an exhibition of handmade British crafts that the OXO Tower gallery planned.
  Then she remembered the maps that she and her husband, Mark, had collected over the years.
  “When we got married in 1983, we had no money and we used this 1949 street atlas of London to go and look at flats,” she said recently during a telephone interview from Liverpool, where they now live. “Of course, half of London had been knocked down by then, and we got lost a lot.”
  “But I wanted to use that map because, in the work I do, I am more or less driven by color, and the maps in this book were absolutely stunning,” she said. “It wasn’t just a black and white map. The Thames was a beautiful turquoise and I thought these colors would work very well on a scarf.”
  After consulting the publisher and investigating copyright restrictions, “we eventually had to use an even older map, from 1929, instead,” she said.
  Adapting the technology was her next hurdle: Digitizing the images and reproducing them on quality fabric “was well out of my comfort zone,” she said. “I’d never done anything like that before.”
  But she learned: “I now scan the map onto my computer, then completely change and intensify the colors. Then I send it on a memory stick to the printer R A Smart in Macclesfield,” a market town in the county of Cheshire, England, that has a tradition of silkmaking, printing and finishing work.
  She experimented with printing the London maps on long rectangles of fine cotton, and using linen as a backing material to create the unisex look of her debut City on Cloth collection. Then she expanded to larger squares of silk twill in colors like pale pink or light blue, and added maps of other cities.
  “I did a Liverpool map because I live in Liverpool,’’ she said. “I found that map on eBay; I’ve spent quite a lot of money on maps over the years.”
  The largest of her silk map scarves costs 130 pounds, or about $160.
  “I could produce them more cheaply if I went abroad,” she said, “but I’d rather help support the Macclesfield businesses.”
  Her designs now include maps of Edinburgh, New Delhi and several French cities, like Paris, Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. And her latest London map scarf features more intense hues, combining a deep-red street pattern with parks in emerald green and a turquoise Thames.
  “I think people like maps,’’ Mrs. Chatterton said. “This makes you see them differently: I see them as scarves now.”
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