A few years ago my brothers and sisters and I decided to switch from buying gifts to doing a handmade gift exchange for Christmas. This year I decided to look back to near the beginning of when I started crocheting for inspiration and make some amigurumi stormtroopers for my brother's family from the pattern in the Star Wars Crochet kit.
I started by making two troopers, but I wanted to add a Christmas-y touch. The first thing I thought of would be to just give them Santa hats, but I felt like that was maybe too obvious a choice, plus they're already technically wearing helmets so it seemed weird to me to give them hats on top of their helmets. Then I came up with the idea of having them wear Christmas sweaters, and that appealed to me.
I didn't have a pattern, but when I've been making the figures from the patterns in the Nutracker Crochet kit it always reminds me of a sweater when I join the arm tubes onto the torso so I thought I would start there conceptually: make some tubes for arms and then join them onto something that wraps the torso, which I figured I would do as cardigans since the stormtrooper heads might be tough to get through head holes. But usually with the arms I'm starting from a magic ring, so having an open end was something new to me, and I was having a hard time getting them started without getting twisted up. I was tempted to give up on the idea, and for a while I explored just giving them scarves and mittens, but I got hung up trying to figure out how to make the mittens the right size so they could be removable but not just fall off.
I was tempted to give up on the Christmas touch altogether, but I tried one last thing: going back to the idea that I was inspired by and starting from the "body" of rather than the sleeves, and that worked much better for me. I also realized partway through that if I added white trim to the red garment I was making I could just call it a Santa-style coat rather than a Christmas cardigan and that would make more sense. I had originally planned to take some process photos as I worked on a final one after I completed my proof-of-concept version, but the inexorable march of the calendar meant my proof of concept needed to graduate to be the final version.
Here's the pattern I came up with for the coat:
body:
1: Chain 24
2: ch 1, turn, sc 24
3: ch 1, turn, sc 4, sl st 3, sc 10, sl st 3, sc 4
4: ch 1, turn, sc 3, sl st 5, sc 8, sl st 5, sc 3
5: ch 1, turn, sc 3, skip 5, sc 8, skip 5, sc 3
6: ch 1, turn, sc 3, sl st 5, sc 8, sl slt 5, sc3, fasten off
Stitch in the trim color all around the edges.sleeve:
1: work 11 single crochet stitches around an arm hole left by the skips
[2 through 8]: sc 11
9: sc 11, sl st, fasten off
Then I put them in a box, wrapped them up, and shipped them off to my brother's family in Texas. They seemed to like them!
