#the Lea post will be 50% breakdown of what I did

[regallibellbright]

b[Image ID: The first image is a screenshot from the ending of Kingdom Hearts III, showing Isa, Lea, Roxas, and Xion sitting atop the clock tower in Twilight Town, eating sea salt ice cream together and raising it in greeting to their other friends. Roxas is wearing his outfit from the prologue of Kingdom Hearts 2, and Isa, Lea, and Xion finally wearing clothes that aren’t black leather trenchcoats marking them as members of Organization XIII. For Xion, this is her first non-trenchcoat outfit ever. (Isa and Lea were previously depicted in civilian clothes in Birth By Sleep, where they were teenagers.)

The second image shows an amigurumi of Xion in her outfit from this scene, a black blouse with ruffled sleeves and a belt, a short white pleated skirt, and dark brown boots that go up to mid-calf with laces crossing the lighter brown cuffs on top. The amigurumi has light blue safety eyes, and a v-shaped smile embroidered in black yarn. She is sitting on the side of a light fixture, with her legs bent off the side, in front of a box of Cheez-Its. This picture was taken of the amigurumi as originally made in about March 2019.

The third image shows the same amigurumi with some minor modifications. Her face has been modified, as shown in the fourth image, there is now a dark gray square buckle marking her belt, and her boots now have laces running up the tongue, bows tied at the final laces across her cuffs, and two pairs of silver studded buckles.

The fourth image shows a closeup of the amigurumi’s face, showing a small smile embroidered in black embroidery floss, and an embroidered black eyebrow over her left eye, the right portion of her forehead being covered by her bangs.

The fifth image shows the Xion amigurumi, next to a matching Lea amigurumi, sitting atop a jewelry box. Lea is posed so that his left leg is raised slightly off the jewelry box, while his other leg dangles off the edge. Xion sits neatly with her legs dangling off the edge of the box. Both of them have their right arms raised, waving at the viewer. End ID]

Alright, this took a moment to break down in full and get the pictures I wanted for her, but here she is! My KH3 Xion amigurumi, now slightly spiffed up! (Lea will get his own post.)

This gets a LOT more in-depth under the cut, as I break down what I did, and also precisely why her outfit is fantastic but this project was a labor of deepest, deepest love.

First, some technical specs. She’s about ten inches tall all told, and has wire inside to make her posable, as you can see. My original design for her took... eh, a couple months? I started almost as soon as we finished Kingdom Hearts 3. This is actually my second Xion amigurumi - my first was a lot smaller, my first attempt at doing something this ambitious without a pattern, and made in winter 2018 before she finally had a non-cult outfit. (So, yes, I finished one and then almost immediately started a second.) This refurbishing took about three days, and most of that involved my subpar embroidery skills.

I was proud of her before, to be clear - she’s some of my most ambitious work, especially given I’d only been crocheting for about a year and change when I made her, and I went to a LOT of effort getting screenshots of the two scenes it appears in from the ending cutscene. Which are both lit in sunset, making properly gauging the colors difficult. I realized after the fact that I’d missed the buckles on her shoes (as opposed to the laces, which I deliberately simplified,) and figured I’d add them later. Then when I started seriously working on Lea about a year later in summer 2020, I made a couple more detailed additions to his face (He kind of needs eyebrows with that widow’s peak, where the size of Xion’s bangs when crocheted meant I could get away without,) and they’re likely to be details I continue adding for the rest of the set now that I’ve cleared up enough of the tendonitis I got MAKING Lea. So I wanted my favorite character to stand up to her friends.

(In case you’re wondering: Hypermobility plus tendonitis plus not having a hypermobility-trained PT when you first realize you have tendonitis equals ‘having tendonitis for two years because the PT exercises you were given were working the wrong muscles’. Whoops. Good news is that has since been sorted.)

Let’s start with the new work first. The changes to Xion’s face are pretty straightforward - cut off the old smile, spent like an hour deciding what the best expression and placement for her new smile was, added an eyebrow. I don’t really need a new photo for that.

The bulk of it goes in the shoes, anyway.

[Image ID: A closeup of the Xion amigurumi’s boots, showing they are dark brown with lighter brown cuffs, black laces going up to the cuffs with bows tied between them, and two pairs of silver buckles across the bridge of each shoe. The lower buckle of each pair is smaller than the upper buckle. End ID]

I’m not particularly good at tying knots by default - my shoes are all slip-ons or buckled with Velcro, and my embroidery skills are pretty limited because I struggle to do any of the ornamental knots even though they’d be VERY useful for me. So instead of actually tying the embroidery off into bows, which seemed kind of risky, I figured out how to tie a handcuff knot, tightened it enough to serve the purpose, and then sewed them on VERY thoroughly. It looks a bit messy, and it probably is still not the most sturdy method here, but it should serve my purpose and it’d be relatively easy to remake and resew if need be.

I put A LOT of work into getting those crosses straight. Especially across the cuffs, which isn’t even visible anymore with the bows sewn on, but hey. I know I did it.

[Image ID: Closeup of Xion’s boots from the clock tower scene, showing the laces, cuffs, and that the studs on the upper buckles are larger than the studs on the lower set. End ID]

Like I said, I knew I’d missed some kind of braiding or the like on Xion’s boots a while ago. The wikis didn’t have great images, so I checked Youtube for the reMind version of the ending and screenshotted them myself.

Yeah, that’s not braiding. Those are studded buckles. ASYMMETRICALLY studded buckles.

This is far from the worst ‘this outfit is gorgeous but shouldn’t be made in crochet’ moment, compared to things that I had to deal with in the original design (and Lea, we’ll get into HIM later,) but it is definitely a pain. Especially since, with the scale of the doll as she is, I couldn’t simply embroider the smaller studs on - the stitches are too big for that. So instead, I took my three-strand, medium weight acrylic silver yarn, unraveled it, crocheted with the individual unraveled strands, and hoped desperately that it would maintain structural integrity long enough to sew them to the boots, especially because I have a habit of leaving too long a tail to sew on because I misjudge how long everything will need. But this worked! Yay. They’re not strictly accurate, but they do give the same detailing the buckle studs do, and it’s about the closest I can come given the scale of the doll and the work I’d already done - to make her entire body properly scaled, the boots are in the same medium-weight yarn as the one I had for her skintone, since they are her feet, and that means the stitches are a certain size as well. Besides, I’m about to get into the main details of her outfit, or:

Why Xion’s KH3 Ending Look is GORGEOUS, But A Nightmare To Crochet.

  For those of you who don’t crochet, there are a couple things to keep in mind for this.

First, crochet stitches are inherently different from knitting. By default, they tend to have a stiffer structure than knitting. This makes it the more popular craft choice for amigurumi, since it’s easy to make three-dimensional, rounded shapes that hold their shape in crochet. For example, a doll’s head or body - Xion’s head and torso are all one piece, with the arms and legs stitched on separately and the outfit crocheted overtop her main body. (The skirt is actually attached to the main structure of her torso, not just sewn on. I’ll get into that later.) Or that boot shape. What this doesn’t do well is drapery, like say... pleats. It’s also pretty iffy on ruffles, though scalloped shell patterns aren’t that bad. So you know, two of the most distinctive aspects of this outfit texturally are things that the medium isn’t very suited to.

The second thing is that while you can have some VERY elaborate stitch structures and varieties with crochet - just look up granny squares or crocheted lace - allowing for some interesting textural detailing, black yarn tends to eat ALL detail. It just doesn’t show. Not on crochet, at least, and certainly not with the medium-sized yarn weight I was using to match the size of the skintone yarn. (You can find black yarn at pretty much all sizes in any craft store without issue. Finding shades of beige or brown can be harder, especially in smaller sizes.)

Xion’s blouse, of course, is black details on black panels on black. You can’t embroider the buttons on, because it’s black. The belt buckle, once I checked, is also black. Everything’s black. And tragically, my plan for the buttons when I was first crocheting her (using very small safety eyes, which would be shiny) failed because anything small enough to work was too small to stay in the stitches. I added some textural details where I could, but they don’t show up at a distance. So since I was already going to rework her a bit to add a smile and the shoe buckles, I decided I’d add a dark gray belt buckle as well just to add a little visual variety to the blouse, even if it’s probably inaccurate, strictly speaking.

[Image ID: The first image is a closeup of Xion in a later scene from the ending, showing her kneeling on a beach. Image is focused on her blouse, showing details like the size of the sleeve ruffles (very small), the collar and paneling, two lines of six buttons each running above and below the belt, and the belt buckle, which is almost certainly black. I chose to ignore this because literally no other details would show up.

The second image is a closeup on the Xion amigurumi’s blouse, taken when I originally finished her, showing that she has a collar, a closer look at the ruffles, and black raised sections marking both the central plackett of her blouse and the belt. These are not very visible from a distance, as seen in that second image way back at the beginning.

The third image shows the blouse again, now with a dark gray buckle embroidered on, as well as the white pleated skirt. End ID]

The collar exists - it’s even sewn on - but not very visible, because black. I think I just added them in by working into the side of the blouse, which was a separate piece from the head, torso, and skirt. The plackett and belt are both lines of surface crocheted black, in different directions for each. Embroidering the belt buckle was all about placement. It still took me like half an hour to place it in a way I was happy with it, but it’s straightforward.

I actually didn’t make a note at the time how I made the ruffles, but I’m fairly confident it’s the same technique described here by Shiny Happy World - Single crochet increased enough per round to make a ruffled edge. The end ruffles are still proportionately bigger than the in-game outfit, but I don’t think it’s POSSIBLE to make them smaller at this scale. Plus, I’m happy with it.

And then there’s the skirt. Like I said before, it’s actually part of the main body - I’d have to check my notes to be sure, but I’m pretty confident Xion’s body was made from the bottom up, with a white section at the beginning and then switching to tan in a row where I worked back loops only where the skirt would begin. When I was ready to make the skirt, I then attached white yarn to the front loops and searched for a method to crochet pleats.

I will note once again that crocheting pleats is REALLY difficult, and shoutout to this tutorial by Sick Lil Monkeys and this tutorial from Tales of Butterflies detailing two techniques - the first technique is identical to the previous link’s, but the extra pictures helped a lot. The end result is a skirt that’s successfully pleated and holds its shape even while Xion does what she is meant to do - sit atop tall things with her friends. The particular design makes dolls that are pretty top-heavy, though, so getting that effect tends to require something behind her to brace. (Don’t be fooled by that picture - Xion has the obvious box backing her up, but Lea is also being braced by a small plush keychain. It’s just that his posture is already compensating for his MASSIVE hair.)

At some point I really need to make some little sea salt ice creams for everyone. Probably once I finish the set - I’m thinking I break back into the dollmaking with Namine (who I wanted to make anyway, as she deserves love and friends and ice cream, and who is by FAR the easiest of the group to crochet,) and then I think it will finally be Roxas’s turn. (Unless I put him off a bit longer to do Ahiru as Princess Tutu, since I already have the yarn for that after stumbling on a PERFECT shade of pink for the underskirt. But I’ve kept the trio un-reunited for quite a while.)

MAN that outfit’s gonna be tricky, though. And the hair spikes.

I have yarn picked out so I CAN eventually do Isa but he will absolutely be last of the five. He knows what he’s done.

[regallibellbright]

[ID: Six images of a crocheted amigurumi doll of Lea from Kingdom Hearts, shown in the outfit he wears during the end credits of 3. The first shows the amigurumi as a whole, lying flat. The second shows a closeup of its hair, long red triangular spikes, viewed from the side, and the tiny collar on its plaid undershirt just above a black hooded jacket. The third focuses on its plaid shirt, here crocheted in brown with plaid embroidery. The fourth shows a side view of its jacket and sleeves. The fifth shows its legs, bent, and crocheted black boots. The sixth shows Lea sitting next to a doll of Xion, in a matching outfit, sitting on a wooden jewelry box and waving to the viewer. Xion’s legs are dangling over the side, while one of Lea’s is bent to almost lean against the edge of the box. End ID]

A (MUCH) more detailed breakdown under the cut!

Figured I may as well get around to a writeup on this guy, too! Behold! This doll gave me tendonitis for two years. (That’s reductive, of course, but I AM pretty certain those hair spikes were a turning point in the Great Repetitive Stress Injury of 2020.) Still pretty dang proud of it, though. Which is good, because where Xion’s outfit caused me trouble by being Things Not Meant For Crochet, Lea’s outfit caused me trouble by being doable, just hard.

For a start, those hair spikes. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 of them, of varying lengths, and NONE of them want to stay straight. I’ve managed to maintain some semblance of spike through blocking and then re-straightening them a bit by sewing red yarn back and forth through them, but there’s more than is feasible to do at a time, and frankly the hair physics in 3 are such that I don’t mind some of the twisting inwards compared to perfectly outward spikes. I figured these discrete ones would be easier than the more connected spikes I’ll eventually be doing for Roxas (don’t ask me how I plan to do Roxas’s hair. I’ll figure it out. Probably as I’m doing it,) which is one of the reasons why Lea came first.

The plaid is also less intimidating than checkerboard. I obviously had to scale the pattern size up a fair bit to stay visible and doable on a doll who’s about, eh, twelve to fourteen inches tall? I can’t find a tape measure at the moment but he’s a few inches taller than Xion, though not as much as their actual in-game height difference. Most of that’s in the legs (and therefore proportionately arms). He’s a noodle. But for someone who isn’t an embroiderer, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out - that shirt’s actually a rectangular piece of crochet that was embroidered once I made it, and then wrapped around the doll and sewn on in position. It even has a little collar! The light here doesn’t do justice to his jacket/hoodie/overshirt, but I also think that’s pretty neat shaping, at least given I’d only learned to crochet about three years before I made him. The hood at the back is stuffed to add some volume, and then the edge of the coat isn’t sewn on, so it can stay fairly loose. The sleeves were another simplification - there’s a lot of layers of fabric in play there, and adding another underlayer of sleeves that would barely be seen seemed like more trouble than it was worth for strict accuracy’s sake.

Of course, I say that, but I went to a LOT of trouble rewatching the end credits to figure out just what color that shirt and pants were. The end credits where these outfits only ever appear in sunset lighting, which causes a lot of trouble when you’re trying to find reference material. The shirt, I was happy to realize, wasn’t another black-on-black issue like Xion’s blouse (again, great look, but black yarn absorbs all detail,) but instead appears to be a gray or very dark brown under that plaid. I could work with that. Or at least, there’s enough of a brownish tint to the fabric that I could use it as an excuse to vary up the colors, since I had a brown yarn in the right general family. I was figuring this out in late 2019/early 2020 - this was a project that took MONTHS, both because there are so many moving parts and because I was still taking commissions from family at the time... and those commissions were contributing to a repetitive stress injury that would turn into two years of tendonitis.

So at the time, I had enough perfectionist tendencies in me to try and get the color JUST right. Were the shirt and pants the same color? Not quite, but probably too close to really differentiate with what I'd realistically be able to find. Okay, so what color are they? Black? Gray? Brown? Dark red? It’s hard to tell in that sunset lighting in the prerendered cutscenes, even taking screenshots.

And then reMind came out, and included a second runthrough of the end credits cutscenes. This was pretty great, and I was paying close attention as we approached the Twilight Town segment so I could get a better look.

[ID: A close-up screenshot of Kingdom Hearts 3′s ending cutscene. Specifically, it’s a zoom on some of the details on Lea’s outfit from the ending, showing his jacket, long plaid shirt, and dark brown pants with leopard print. End ID]

FUCKING. LEOPARD PRINT.

I’m not even sure this was VISIBLE in the original version of the cutscene, though I’m not certain because we initially reached it with me crowding around a much smaller screen, at like 2 AM because we’d realized it was entering endgame that night after freeing Aqua and had decided to play through and, well. You all know how long the last sequence of the game after that is, right? Anyway, we reached it both overwhelmingly emotional and exhausted, and at the time I was too focused on the fact that they finally had new outfits to take in every individual detail the way I would once I actually started crocheting them. Plus, my immediate priority was Xion. I figured Lea would follow at some point.

I’m not an embroiderer. I can’t do knots, and while I’d like to pick it up it’s one of those skills where as far as I can tell I will actually need not just a demonstration, but a person who can physically move my hands through the motions once so I can imitate that. (Dyspraxia is fun.) Those pants are the tubes of Lea’s legs, and they are very narrow, and they are not stuffed, because they’re actually filled with wire that makes him bendable. I wasn’t touching the leopard print. I can by now conceive of a future where, having this whole set done, I maybe make a second set and give them to someone or donate them somewhere so I can write down Xion’s outfit pattern notes and eventually sell the patterns as a set. (Provided the second Lea doesn’t ALSO give me tendonitis.) But I don’t think I’d be able to do the leopard print even then. Just. No.

Any other notes? Let’s see - the hair is made of spikes overtop a red cap, essentially, that is itself sewn over the doll head. (Xion’s and Namine’s hair are one connected piece coming from a similar round circular ‘cap’ - I haven’t finished Namine’s hair yet, but I feel confident hers will follow the same basic principles.) The boots are, I’m pretty dang sure, done so that the round that changed to the brown of his pants was back loops only, and then the tops were done overtop that. There’s a tiny bit of sculpting there, though it’s not really visible, to add heels. I think I’ll be doing Namine’s sandals with actual heels, at least if my plan for them works, so I might end up adding Lea’s as a touch up after. Still, gives a nice effect and layering while being easy to do. He is, unsurprisingly, even more top-heavy than Xion - that hedgehog hair needs to be properly braced for him to sit upright. But it makes me happy to see them sitting on my shelf. (I am DEFINITELY going to figure out a tiny sea salt ice cream for them all once Roxas is done. Maybe tiny velcro sticks?)