If you’ve spent any time with a crochet hook, you’re likely familiar with fundamental stitches like the slip stitch, single crochet, and double crochet. But to truly shape your projects, you need to master two essential techniques: increases and decreases.
These techniques are crucial for anyone creating three-dimensional items like beanies, hats, or amigurumi (crocheted toys). By adjusting the number of stitches in each round, you can manipulate the fabric to create everything from a perfectly rounded sphere to the tapered point of a hat.
How Increases and Decreases Shape Your Work
- Increasing a stitch means you’re adding stitches to your work, causing the fabric to expand.
- Decreasing a stitch means you’re removing stitches, causing the fabric to contract.
Let’s use a beanie as an example. When you start from the top, you typically work in a circle. You begin with a small number of stitches in a magic ring. To create the dome shape, you must increase the number of stitches in each subsequent round. This widens the fabric, forming the flat top and then the curved sides of the beanie. Conversely, when you want to narrow the shape—for example, to close the top of an amigurumi—you would start to decrease the number of stitches.
The Basics of Increasing and Decreasing
- Increasing: This is the process of working two or more stitches into a single stitch. For example, a single crochet increase involves working two single crochets into the same stitch from the previous row. This creates a wider, more open pattern that often looks like a “V” in your work.
- Decreasing: This is the process of combining two or more stitches into one. A single crochet decrease, for instance, involves working one single crochet across two separate stitches from the previous row. This pulls the fabric together, creating a tighter pattern that often resembles an inverted “V” or a “/.”
By understanding and applying these simple techniques, you can move beyond flat projects and unlock a whole new world of creative crochet possibilities!
