Bonnie Burton and "Admiral Sackbar" (photo courtesy Bonnie Burton)

Regular readers of Geek To Me should know who she is, but for those of you who just joined us let me give you a little introduction to the Queen of Geek Gals: Bonnie Burton.

After joining Lucasfilm – AKA Geek Heaven – in May of 2003, Bonnie became a Senior Editor on StarWars.com. But don’t think that all she deals in are Droids and Jedi Knights.  Do a Google search on her and you find that she has her own website – Grrl.com – and has hosted her own YouTube show called “Ask Bonnie.”  She’s even appeared on G2Mtv to give advice on how to survive Comic-Con.

Now the geek gal of all trades has a new book out from Random House Publishing called “The Star Wars Craft Book.” Featuring countless crafting projects for Star Wars fans of all ages, the Star Wars Craft Book has proven to be a labor of love for Burton, who has a reputation as a crafting maven.  Bonnie spoke to me from her office at Lucasfilm in San Francisco, where she told me where the idea for the book came from; what she enjoys most about crafts; and what she hopes to see from Star Wars fans in the months ahead:

Geek To Me: Where did the idea for the Star Wars Craft Book come from?

Bonnie Burton: I’ve been doing crafts since I was a kid – and I’ve been a geek since I was a kid – so I tend to try and sneak crafts into the workplace any way I can. And I’ve worked at different websites, At Home Network, Excite.com, AOL, and many times I was in charge of the kids’ sections. So I would sneak any kind of crafting things in there. But it wasn’t until I started at Lucasfilm that I kind of inherited the kids’ section from an editor who had left. We had a lot of common things that you would see on a kids’ section on a website. You know, interactive games, trivia and that sort of thing. And I was like ‘how come there’s no ‘low-fi’ things?’ (laughs) Which was funny to ask for a website, but my whole point was when I was a little kid I always liked making stuff; getting my hands covered in glitter, using popsicle sticks and empty milk cartons and making stuff.

I always liked the back of “Highlights” magazine and “Cricket” which had crafts, “Ranger Rick” or any of those magazines. And I know that the old Star Wars magazines – Bantha Tracks and so on – they had crafts in them.  So I thought “why don’t we bring some of that back?” So the very first craft we had on the site was how to make a TIE FIGHTER holiday ornament which was originally a craft that had shown up in one of the issues of “Bantha Tracks” around 1981.  And it just started getting my juices flowing, and I was like ‘why don’t we do original crafts for the site?’ As a kid, when you come to Starwars.Com/Kids you can find crafts to do at different levels of crafting. But obviously they are all very kid friendly.

"The Star Wars Craft Book" (Cover image courtesy Random House Publishing)

G2M: What were some of the first crafts that you did?

BB: Some of the first crafts we had were how to make marble magnets, which are an extremely easy craft to make. You just need glue, little circle images of your favorite Star Wars characters,  those flat glass aquarium stones or flower arranging stones that you can find in any gift shop, and round magnets. You can make a ton of these and they’re great for gifts, whatever. And little kids make them.

And then Valentine’s Day was coming around, so of course you had to get out the old potato stamp craft. So I showed kids how to make heart and Rebel Alliance symbol potato stamps.

And then came Halloween and Christmas, and originally I was just doing this for holidays, but then I realized that there’s a lot of fun little crafts that you can do that don’t have holidays attached to them; sock puppets and bean art; what to do with old your CD jewel cases, so I had an Ewok frame tutorial; tissue box cozies that looked like Chewbacca, and things like that.

This (book) just kind of grew out of that. I was so excited for this section because as it became more and more popular that when I would go to conventions – like Comic-Con or Wonder-Con – parents would come up to me and say ‘oh we love your crafts. It’s so much fun to print out your crafts, go to the kitchen table and on an afternoon or weekend and work with my my kids on how to make a spoon puppet or how to make a tote bag out of an old t-shirt.’ They would be just really super excited and then ask “when’s the book coming out?” (laughs) And I hadn’t even thought about, basically, putting all these crafts in a book, and doing more crafts. And I was like ‘wow, that’s a really great idea’ but at the same time I was organizing the drawing tutorials for StarWars.Com – which was another kind of low-fi activity – cuz’ I know as a little kid I always loved to draw. And so I was concentrating on trying to get those books done because out of doing the drawing tutorials I was getting the same reaction from parents, you know ‘when does that book come out?’ And luckily Lucas Publishing decided to do the drawing books first and I was lucky enough to be asked to do those. So, I got to do both “You Can Draw Star Wars” from DK Publishing and “Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars” from Klutz.

And once those were done I was like “I really wanna do this craft book.” So luckily Random House came to the rescue and said ‘yeah, we’d love to do a craft book with you.’ And so that came about.

G2M: Are all the crafts in the book from StarWars.Com?

Make your own Admiral Sackbar puppet! (Click on image to view full size)

BB: It’s funny because I didn’t want all the crafts in the book to be the crafts that were featured on StarWars.Com, even though they’re great crafts.  I only wanted a small percentage of those to be in the book and do a bunch of original crafts too. There’s a good mix of stuff you’ve seen on StarWars.Com and a lot of original crafts, crafts that I asked some of our ’craftier’ Star Wars fans to submit.  Like the R2-D2 crochet beanie; there are some (Star Wars) inspired pumpkins; Han in ‘soapanite’ (laughs). There’s all these great things that our fans have done because our fans are amazingly talented people.

G2M: You’ve been crafting since you were a kid; and were in charge of the kids’ section on many sites; do you have a background in working with kids?

BB: It’s funny, I don’t. When I was in 4H (laughs) I took a kids’ mentoring program where I was the older kid that kind of got partnered up with a bunch of younger kids. And I always resorted to crafts to keep them occupied. And then that just happened any time that I was doing volunteer work, whether I was volunteering at a children‘s hospital or with high-risk kids. I always tried to do as much volunteer work as possible, especially when I was a teenager and in college. I thought that was important and still do. But I’d always do crafts, because the thing that makes kids more excited than anything is to give them a bunch of art materials and say ‘go for it. Do what you want. Here’s some instructions but make it your own.’ And that’s true for giving them art supplies to paint a portrait, or even like the silly things.

I have a craft in the book that’s “Star Wars painted rocks” and its something I remember doing in Girl Scouts. You find a bunch of flat rocks that have kind of a cool shape to them and then you paint faces on them. Or you paint them into animals, using acrylic paint. And that’s something I remember doing that seemingly sounds silly and not that exciting, but if you give a bunch of kids some rocks and some paint and say ‘paint your favorite character‘, they’ll do it. And they’ll be occupied for hours. And that’s the one thing that parents and grandparents always come up to me and say: “Thank you for giving me an idea that’s creative to keep my grandkids and kids busy for a very long time.” (laughs)

G2M: (laughs)

BB: Random House did a great job designing the book. There’s crafts for every age group, every gender, definitely guys and girls. They’ll find something in here. It’s not all knitting, it’s not all jewelry making. Although both of those things are in there, there’s also stuff for guys that I think they will really like.

Jabba the Hutt Body Pillow (image courtesy Bonnie Burton & Random House Publishing)

My favorite craft is definitely unisex in the sense that it’s the Jabba the Hutt body pillow. Which is very comfortable and my dog is probably asleep on it right now. (laughs) It’s a craft that I did literally one Sunday while watching Monty Python. Like a Sunday afternoon, that’s all it took. And it’s a great way to use up any old pillows that you have.

I’m really excited to see what fans make from the book. I hope they customize things and change them up, and make them their own. They don’t have to do exactly what’s in the book, they can mix it up. You know I’d love to see what fans do, so hopefully when I go to conventions they will find me and tell me what they made. Or hopefully they will e-mail me or find me on Twitter or Facebook and let me know. ‘Cuz I’m always excited to see what our fans make. I know I’m being biased, but I think that Star Wars fans are some of the most talented, creative, cool people on earth.  I’m lucky to have a job where I get to interact with them on a regular basis.

You can buy the Star Wars Craft Book at Star Wars Shop or on Amazon!