I've been working on these little Star Wars guys on and off for a couple of years, and now I've finshed writing up the patterns for all of them. Partly inspired by my and my children's love of Star Wars, and the way Star Wars Lego looks so cute, I realised that I wanted to crochet mini versions of all my favourite characters. It's taken so long because of wanting to keep them stylistically similar even though the characters are very varied. I also wanted them to be different sizes, so that Leia is taller than R2-D2, and Vader is taller than Han, for example, but not perfectly proportionally, or Chewie ends up being too tall. As it is, Yoda is 2.5" tall and Chewbacca is 4.5" tall, with the rest fitting in between them.
I made Yoda first, he's pretty simple and easily identifiable, then Leia (my favourite character, the one I identify with) whose iconic hairstyle is perfectly suited to be reproduced in crochet. Neither of these two had legs, Yoda with his robe and Leia her dress, so when it came to most of the other characters I wasn't sure how to make them. I knew I wanted them to have big feet, and to stand up easily, and so I made them without separate legs, but simply defined them with yarn afterwards, a solution which I'm really happy with.
Some of them took longer than others to perfect. I wasn't sure if C-3PO would work, but I was happy with him straight away. R2-D2 came out well, but worked even better when I realised that I could make his legs jointed by using safety eyes. Vader, on the other hand, I just couldn't get right. His head, his face mask, how much detail to give him. Since his costume is almost entirely black it's very hard to define any details. I made him several times with a flat triangular mask and it wasn't until I made it more three-dimensional that I was satisfied.
The Ewok was tough to get right, too. I love Ewoks, and had already made a larger version of Wicket (
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=130572.msg1269260#msg1269260). I made him in a completely different way with his hood as part of his head, which I thought I liked, but when I came to write the pattern up it just seemed too unnecessarily complicated. Since I'd just been making my crocheted cork knights (
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=337126.msg3899007#msg3899007) I realised I could use a similar technique to make a simple separate hood, which I much preferred.
Apart from fine-tuning his height, I liked my Chewbacca, which I made with an alpaca mix yarn then brushed, but I realised that finding that particular type of yarn might be difficult. So I also made him using a normal smooth acrylic yarn that had various different browns in it and which brushed up just as nicely with a wire pet brush.
Getting the hair right for Han and Luke took a bit of working out, but in the end I decided to keep it simple, and the same with their clothes. You can't see it on the photo here, but Han has the red stripe sewn down the side of his trousers which looks quite effective (check out my Flickr pages if you want to see any more photos).
Anyway, I'm very happy with the finished patterns. I think I'll have to work on some more characters now - maybe I'll do Boba Fett and Obi Wan next. I'd love to hear what you all think of them.
