Alphinaud from FFXIV
Final Fantasy XIV
Pattern: Heartilly Doll by ME!
Craft: knitting
Started: 2025-05-06
Finished: 2026-03-06
So I wasn’t a finalist this year in the 2026 FFXIV Fan Fest art contest, but I’m still proud of what I made. Here’s the story of how I came to knit Alphinaud.
Last May, my depression flared up. Lots of little things were going wrong, and I lost confidence in myself. I needed to do SOMETHING to regain my confidence, so I decided to knit Alphi.
Knitting is my safe space. It’s the one area of my life where I am fearless and unafraid to try new things. Because it’s just yarn, folks - if you make a mistake, you rip out and redo it. The yarn doesn’t mind! (well, most of the time).
So I knew I’d be knitting SOMETHING, and settled on Alphinaud because I adore his character. He keeps moving forward, even when things go wrong or are especially hard. He doesn’t give up. I could use a bit of his courage, and hoped knitting him would help.
Knitting his body was the easy part. The pattern is my own design that I’ve knit at least 10 times before, so it was just a matter of doing it again and making slight changes as Alphinaud is on the slimmer side. It took 22.5 hours over the course of 20 days.
The clothes would be trickier, as I’d be designing them from scratch based on his in-game Sage outfit.
I started with a boot. I wasn’t sure how to do the flaps at first. I tried doing fold-over flaps but could not wrap my head around the logistics needed for the fold. I scrapped that and then tried flaps separately. That worked better!
I was testing different yarns, though, and the yarn I had tried was too gauzy held singly. So I scrapped that attempt and tried again with the yarn held double. It worked better, but made a tight boot that could stand up on its own. Oops!
Eventually, I gave up on the boot and started on his white tunic. I tried knitting the split hem first, but it was NOT going well.
So I put the tunic aside and knit his pants. This wasn’t too bad, because I’d previously made pants for other dolls so it was just a matter of a few alterations to be true to his in-game pants.
This brought me to end of July 2025. Life improved. I had regained my confidence and gotten busy with stuff, so Alphinaud went to the wayside for a time.
Then in late January, the Fan Fest Art Contest was announced! Now, I actually did consider making some other things for it, but some quick calculations told me I didn’t have the time. So back to Alphi I went.
His white tunic was first. I goofed on my first attempt by not making an opening at back that would allow it to pass over his head. So I ripped and redid it.
I knit the tunic top down, ending with a point made by decreases on both front and back. It was then time to make the “tails” of the tunic.
Here I made a collosal error: I went off memory, and did not double check the reference picture. I thought there were three tails on both front and back. I dutifully knit them. WRONG!
So I had to rip out all that work and redo the tails. This took a lot of contemplation and experiment to get them right!
I started the tails bottom up. Doing the silver stripes was easy. The problem was that the angle of the tails’ bottoms did not match the angle of the tunic bottoms. I would need to determine how to account for that angle.
The answer, after much trial and error: SHORT ROWS! I knit the bottom of the tails first, then did short rows to turn a corner and square off the top, then did decreases along the top to match the angle of the tunic. WHEW!
I finally finished the white tunic on February 26, and went on to the boots, which I reknit in heavier weight yarn. That worked better!
I did not finish the boots until March 2nd. Time was running out - the deadline was the 6th. Would I finish in time? I still needed to do his coat, gloves, and place/style his hair, at the very least.
I started his coat next. Thankfully, I’ve made doll coats before, so had some idea of how to do it, so I didn’t waste much time figuring things out.
Even so, I did not finish the coat until 6:17pm CST on the 6th. EEP! Just a few hours left to deadline!
I took a break for dinner, then went back to it. I started placing hair, spending 40 minutes on it and stopping at 8pm.
I had previously done the first glove when taking a break from the coat, but needed to knit the second. That took 1 hour 13 minutes, finishing at 9:14pm CST.
Finally, I finished the hair. It took me another 1 hour 16 minutes. I finished at 10:30pm CST - 3.5 hours before the midnight PST deadline.
I’d done all the knitting I could. I had planned on doing smaller details as well, but there just wasn’t time. Still, I felt he was recognizably Sage Alphinaud. Time for photos!
Unfortunately, photos took some cursing and extra time. To get decent photos in the horizontal layout required took me another hour and a half.
I submitted my official entry just after midnight CST - about two hours before the deadline. Here’s those pics. They are not great, so I am not surprised I did not make finalist.
Am I disappointed? Of course. But still: proud of myself. I persevered and worked hard and got it done to my satisfaction. Here’s some close-up glamor shots I took!
Alisaie supervised during this process as I had previously knit her–five years ago, so my gauge changed. This meant Alphinaud turned out smaller as I had tightened up some over the years.
Here’s the twins together - and yes, Alisaie is LIVID at being the bigger, more “rugged” twin.
