Via Starwars.com:

Star Wars Epic Yarns was a labor of love.

We were thrilled and honored to create this new board book series which abridges each film in the original trilogy in just 12 words and 12 images. Our unique illustrative process — a combination of needle felting, scale model making, and photography — is labor intensive at the best of times. But accurately recreating a galaxy far, far away for the discerning eye of the Star Wars faithful made our task that much more challenging.

The first step in illustrating the series was creating the needle-felted figures. Needle felting is essentially sculpting with wool. Loose wool (or epic yarns, if you will!) is stabbed repeatedly with a barbed needle, which entangles the fibers and makes the wool firm enough to hold shape. Each figure is felted around an armature of wire, which allows the figures to be posed and re-posed easily. EachStar Wars figure — made at a 1:7 scale — took 20 to 60 hours to complete, depending on size and complexity. C-3PO, Darth Vader and the stormtroopers probably took the longest to make.

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