Embroidering The Child… This is the Way….

As the Twitter user @lindseyromain said… “i’ve never seen the entire internet united by undying love for something like baby yoda before and I refuse to be cynical about it. he is the child we conceived together and the child we deserve.”

Well said… well said. I went cuckoo for the porgs in Star Wars: The Last Jedi but my fervor soon waned. As adorable as their big eyes, squishy bodies and bird legs were, they just didn’t have any personality to invoke a religious-like devotion……. porgs have no staying power.

Enter The Mandalorian

I did not expect this show to be much more than just a fun side note in the otherwise prolific Star Wars universe. But I, and the internet at large, gave a collective gasp at the end of the first episode when wee baby Yoda emerged from the shadows in his egg-shaped cribby-crib and extended is teeny tiny finger up to Din Djarin who looked right back and extended his own finger, melting mankind’s hearts in a single moment.

As the series unfolded we discovered that baby Yoda (yes I know it’s not actually baby Yoda- but we don’t know the species name so baby Yoda it is until they deign to gift us with its precious name) was not a one-off fluke (like previously mentioned Porgs), but a deep well of power, sass, and utter adorableness.

Episode 4 launched what is being called the Baby Yoda Drinking Soup meme… deftly taking the Kermit the frog sipping tea meme and leap-frogging (enjoy that totally intended pun) to stratospheric heights of internet memery!

I had been obsessively scrolling through pages and pages of embroidery on both Pinterest and Instagram for a while and I was suddenly struck with the great and mighty need to embroider the Child in all of his soup-sipping sassiness! This idea was the impetus that began any and all embroidery that will henceforth issue from my hands.

I bought and worked my way through the Domestika.org course “Painting with Thread” with the primary goal of enshrining the beloved alien in cotton thread forthwith! My practice project completed, I began to lay my plans for the Child’s beginnings…..

Using the basic ideas from the Domestika course, as well as some ideas from the Royal School of Needlework Book of Embroidery which I bought for myself with a Christmas gift card, I printed the screenshot I wanted to copy, traced the outline, made several copies and them created a colored guide, a stitch sense plan, an outline/ accent line page, and a color division plan. Basically I now knew the color and direction of all of my stitches (in theory). Now to begin!

The Child did grow in glory, but slowly… oh so slowly….

And then… his head was complete!

I will confess that by the time I was approaching the end of the robe, I was so ready to be done that I think there may be less than optimal shading in some areas, i.e. the physics of light no longer held sway as my enthusiasm to finish trumped my attention to detail, and I KNOW my stitch direction went a little haywire… but overall the effect was still excellent 🙂