How to close an amigurumi ball

in this video i’ll show you how to finish a closed piece of amigurumi so this is intended to be a closed sphere and you may be looking at it and wondering why there’s a giant gaping hole in the middle of it no worries this often happens when you are trying to finish a closed piece in amigurumi it’s just the nature of how yarn works and how tightly you stitch so first things first i’m gonna put the hook into the loop where i just finished my last decrease stitch and i like to do a slip stitch in the next stitch because as you can see right now the height of this round is taller than things here and i just want to have a starting point where the rounds are more level so i’m going to stick my hook into the next stitch and just slip stitch and then i’m just going to keep on pulling on the yarn tail so that it goes all the way through and now you can see it looks a little bit more seamless all the way around but we are not done yet because there is still a giant gaping hole in the middle of this put your hook aside grab your tapestry needle and yarn tail thread it through and now what you’re going to do is insert the needle into only the front loops of these last few stitches and so what you got to do is first find what the next stitch is as you can see here i just did a slip stitch into this stitch which means this is the next stitch and then for those of you not familiar with what front loop and back loop means every stitch can be visualized as a v here’s the two sides of the v the side that is closer to you also known as the outer loop is the front loop so you’re going to stick your needle under the front loop on the next stitch and then pull the yarn tight and keep on doing this until the hole disappears normally you only have to do this as many times as there are stitches in the final round sometimes you have to keep on going to make that hole disappear but here we go i think i did five even though there are six final stitches in this round so that’s what i mean by you don’t always have to do the exact number as the number of stitches in that final round and i’m pretty satisfied with how that looks i’m pretty satisfied with the size of that hole so now what i want to do is make sure that this doesn’t all fall apart which means i need to weave in the yarn tail so i’m going to put the needle into the very middle of this hole and i’m gonna have the needle come out on some other side of this amigurumi because my goal is to get the yarn tail stuck in the stuffing on the inside because that’s what’s going to prevent the yarn tail from moving around and eventually falling out and so since i still have quite a lot of yarn tail left i like to just do this a few times to be extra secure so again stick it through the hole that the yarn tail came out of and now poke it on the outside of some other piece of some other part of your piece and then pull the yarn tail just enough so that it disappears you don’t want to tuck it as tight as you can at this point because what you’re trying to do again is tangle up the yarn tail inside the stuffing so right now i made a path like this inside my piece if i tugged really hard i would just re-route the yarn straight and that would defeat the point of me trying to purposely keep moving the yarn tail around so that it gets super tangled inside i’m just gonna do it one more time and then you’re going to grab some scissors pull the yarn tail a little bit tighter than you normally would want and cut the yarn as close as possible to the actual piece oh i need to get some sharper scissors all right and then all right in this case the yarn tail did disappear inside the piece but in case there was anything sticking out you would just massage your piece until the yarn disappeared and now you have a completely contained sphere