The Invisible Decrease, and Why Your Amigurumi Has Bumps

If your amigurumi looks slightly lumpy where the head narrows, the decrease is almost always the cause. A standard single-crochet decrease pulls two whole stitches together, and the four loops involved have to go somewhere — they end up as a small bump sitting proud of the surface. On a flat blanket nobody notices. On a stuffed sphere, where the fabric is stretched tight, every bump reads.

The invisible decrease solves this by working only the front loops of the two stitches.

How to work it

1. Insert your hook into the front loop only of the next stitch.
2. Without yarning over, insert the hook into the front loop only of the following stitch. You now have three loops on the hook.
3. Yarn over and pull through the first two loops — the two front loops you just picked up.
4. Yarn over and pull through both remaining loops.

The two back loops you skipped stay behind the work, on the inside of the toy, where the stuffing hides them. On the outside you get a single stitch that sits at the same height as its neighbours.

When to use it, and when not to

Use it everywhere you decrease on a stuffed piece: the top of a head, the closing rounds of a body, the taper on a tail. It is the default in modern amigurumi patterns, and when a pattern says dec without qualifying it, this is usually what it means.

Do not use it on flat pieces worked in rows — ears crocheted flat, or a scarf. There the back loops are visible from both sides and the decrease looks lopsided. Use a normal sc2tog for those.

The mistake almost everyone makes first

Yarning over after the first insertion. It feels natural, because that is what every other stitch does, but it produces a normal decrease with an extra loop’s worth of slack. Pick up both front loops first, then yarn over. If your decrease still looks bumpy, this is the step to check.

One more thing that causes bumps

Even a perfect invisible decrease looks wrong if the decreases stack. When a pattern says [sc 3, dec] 6 times, the decreases land in the same place on every round and form a visible seam running down the piece. Good patterns offset them — one stitch further along each round — so the shaping spirals instead of lining up. If you are writing your own shaping, offset by one stitch each round and the seam disappears.