Star Wars Tapestry Crams The Entire Franchise Into 30 Feet Of Fabric
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There’s no denying that Star Wars fandom existed before the Internet took hold, and would still be here even if no one was getting online. But one thing the net has allowed is the sharing of rare pictures and artifacts from the film series, while allowing for infinitesimal and detail-oriented obsessions to grow and take hold in strange ways. Want to build your own R2-D2 droid? You can. Want to perform John Williams’ iconic theme a capella? You can. Want to weave a gigantic tapestry accounting for nearly all of the features’ characters and events? Who would ever want to do a time-intensive thing like that?
Aled Lewis like a motherfu…well, like a sister-kisser, in the case of Luke and Leia. Lewis is a London-based illustrator, author, and all-around pop culture maestro. He handcrafted a 30-foot x 13-inch cross-stitch tapestry that stretches from one end of a room or galaxy to another, and it’s currently on display at Gallery1988 in Los Angeles. It’s hard to imagine what was going on inside his head when he began this project, which had to be completely different from where he was at the mid-point. At that stage, I would have been ripping my hair out and trying to put that into the stitching, swearing that I was the only Sith lord that deserved anyone’s attention. Me!
With the Bayeux Tapestry (technically not a tapestry) serving as inspiration, Lewis laid out in as sequential an order as possible the events from The Phantom Menace right down through Return of the Jedi. It’s a great time to have gotten it done, as I’m certain J.J. Abrams‘ upcoming seventh Episode will try and rework part of the franchise’s history in some way, probably by introducing a mirror-filled lighthouse and a temple.
For stitch-techs, he used a “7 stitch per inch Klostern fabric” that was “stiffened with a thin batting and hemmed with a custom-made printed pixel star fabric on the rear.” To accompany the ridiculous amount of visual information, he also added some of the film’s most famous quotes along the border, written in the Star Wars language of Aurebesh. Check out some close-ups of the fabric below, along with an Aurebesh key.
Pretty amazing stuff, right? I mean, just look at these details.
So if you’ve got $20,000, plus a house with a wall long enough to house this exquisite work, just go here to place your order. And give them my address to ship to, since we’re such good friends and all. Or maybe just get me the following Battle Royale-inspired image on a T-shirt as a finder’s fee. The Greedy Force is with me!
