May the Fourth be with you! (Yoda Crochet)

It's Star Wars Day!  As many a geek will say today, "May the fourth be with you".
According to wikipedia, the phrase dates back to a pun in a London newspaper headline in the late 70's.  There's more to it though.  This was the most interesting (and amusing) part of the article for me:

"In a 2005 interview on German news TV channel N24, George Lucas was asked to say the famous sentence "May the Force be with you." The interpreter simultaneously interpreted the sentence into German as Am 4. Mai sind wir bei Ihnen ("We shall be with you on May 4"). This was captured by TV Total and aired on May 18, 2005.^[5]"

In honor of the day, I finished what I started a while ago from this Yoda crochet pattern.  It took a while, but partially because my crochet skills are rusty.  I love amigurumi (making little figures pretty much), but I always run into problems when I'm crocheting in 3-D.  I had to start this over a couple of times before I got it right.

Finished Product - Step-by-step pictures after the break

Finished Head

Start of the body - the neck area looks too skinny now, but works in the end

I had to restart with the brown a few times because darker colors are harder to see

Half stuffed

Fully stuffed

The arms - I need to use a smaller hook for the arms and feet next time

Feets!  This was actually the most fun part for me.  Ears were a close second

Ready to assemble

The ears were the first time I've ever sewed a crochet piece together.  I tried to keep them off the top of the head and retain pointiness

Bottom of the feet

Stitched together

Starting on the hair

Time consuming process of untwisting all the yarn for hair

Hair from the front

The cape - I did offwhite because it seems closer to the movies

Faceless

Look good Yoda does

The first of many Yoda attacks

He can learn to love Yoda

I followed the pattern exactly except for a few things.  I used a smaller hook (size F) to get a smaller end product.  I should have done a bigger one for the boy/head/cape and small for the rest.  It came out alright though.  I also added hair and a face.  

The hair is several (maybe 8 or so) 2-inch pieces of the same off-white yarn as the cape.  In retrospect, I wish I had used pure white for the hair, but I couldn't find my white yarn.  I pulled each through random stitches on the back of the head so the middle of each white piece was under the green stitch.  I made sure to put one above each ear to give that bald-top-of-the-head look.  Then I untwisted each of the yarn pieces.

For the face, I cut about 4 inches of black yarn and untwisted it to get 4 thinner pieces.  For each eye, I folded the yarn in half, put the hook at the halfway point, pulled it through 2 stitches around eye area leaving a tail, and then pulled the tail through the loop.  I did this twice for each eye.  I did a similar thing for the mouth, but used a longer width of stitches (3 or 4).  I also poked a couple of stitches open some above the mouth to make it look like nostrils a bit.

Hope you enjoy!

Now that you've gotten through that whole post, it's safe for me to admit that I have only see Episode I (yes, the Jar Jar Binks one) of Star Wars and don't intend to see the rest yet.  I made a promise that I'd wait for the right guy to see both trilogies - one who can understand why I want to get the new ones over with before I see the original 3.  So, I guess I won't be seeing them until I'm married.