How to Decrease in Knitting: An Essential Beginner’s Guide

Learning how to decrease in knitting is an essential skill once you move beyond simple scarves and dishcloths. Decreases shape your fabric, therefore helping you create sleeves, necklines, hats, and more. If you’re ready to add this next step to your knitting toolkit, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know.

The Honey & Salt Hat pattern contains lots of decreases to shape the top, visible in this photo where you can see the knit columns pulling in closer to each other towards the top of the hat.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• What Does “Decrease in Knitting” Mean?

• What Does “Leaning” Mean When Decreasing?

• The Most Common Types of Knitting Decreases

  • Knit Two Together (K2TOG)

  • Slip, Slip, Knit (SSK)

  • Purl Two Together (P2TOG)

• How to Decrease Without Leaving Holes

• How to Evenly Decrease Across a Row

Decreases are a staple in nearly every pattern I write, be it garments or accessories, and in this post I’ll share both the basic how-tos as well as some pro tips that I've picked up along the way to make your edges neat and polished.

What Does “Decrease in Knitting” Mean?

A decrease in knitting is when you reduce the total number of stitches on your needle by working two (or more) stitches into one. This technique shapes your fabric, giving structure and form to otherwise long, rectangular, flat pieces.

Decreases are especially common for:

• Tapering sleeves and cuffs

• Shaping the crown of a hat

• Creating necklines and armholes when knitting from the bottom up

• Adding definition to waist shaping in fitted garments

Increases and decreases work hand-in-hand: one adds stitches, the other removes them. Together, they’re the building blocks of shaping in knitting, so if you haven't already check out my post on How to Increase in Knitting: A Must-Read Beginner Knitters Guide.

What Does “Leaning” Mean When Decreasing?

Most decreases (and increases) go towards a certain direction.

Decreases can be:

• Right-leaning 

• Left-leaning 

• Neutral with little to no lean at all

Decreasing with the right lean will create a neater, more polished finished object — especially when working for symmetrical shaping, for example shawls! If you find yourself asking, "Which way do knitted decreases lean?" don't worry for now... Just follow the pattern as the designer intended it to be and with time you'll start to recognise the way the stitches lean!

The Most Common Types of Knitting Decreases

Here are the decreases you’ll encounter most often as a beginner, each one decreases by one stitch. However, I have also included a note in each about how you decrease by two stitches with a similar technique.

1. Knit Two Together (K2TOG)

Lean: Slants to the right.

How to work it:

1. Insert your right-hand needle through the first two stitches on the left-hand needle at the same time as if to knit.

2. Knit the two stitches at the same time.

3. Slip both stitches off the right-hand needle.

4. Voilà, you have just 'removed' one stitch!

A pro of this decrease? It's incredibly easy to work and easy to remember! When you don't need to consider the lean of the decreases, this can be your go-to decrease.

2-stitch decrease equivalent: The K3TOG is where you knit three stitches at the same time and a as a result decrease by two stitches, not one.

2. Slip, Slip, Knit (SSK)

Lean: Slants to the left (used often to mirror the K2TOG)

How-to:

1. Slip one stitch from your left-hand needle to your right needle knitwise (meaning you put your left-hand needle through the stitch as if to knit, but just slip it across without working it)

2. Repeat the same motion again to slip the next stitch knitwise. You now have two 'un-worked' stitches on your right-hand needle.

3. Hold those two stitches in place with your right-hand index finger and insert your left needle through the back of both slipped stitches.

4. Use the working yarn to wrap the left-hand needle and knit them together.

5. You have just decrease by one stitch!

Positive of this technique? Once you get the hang of it, it looks really neat and is worth the effort to learn!

To decrease two stitches in a left-lean, you work a combination of the SSK and K2TOG to become SK2P. In this technique you slip the first stitch (as in step one of the SSK), then K2TOG, and once you have the slipped stitch and decreased stitch on your right-hand needle, you pull the slipped stitch over the decreased stitch to decrease a further stitch.

3. Purl Two Together (P2TOG)

How it looks: This purl-side decrease looks the same as any other decrease on stockinette when worked on the wrong side. If you were to look at it from the wrong side, it would lean left. Looking at it from the right side, it would lean right.

How to decrease like this:

1. Insert your right-hand needle purlwise through the first two stitches on your left needle.

2. Purl the two stitches at the same time, this will work them together into one stitch.

3. Slip them off your left-hand needle.

4. You have just decreased one stitch.

Looking for a wrong-side, right-leaning equivalent? You would work a P2TOGTBL, or Purl Two Together Through the Back Loop. This can be tricky as you need to twist the needle around and purl through the back loop of the two stitches, and then slip them off the needle. Take a look at this youtube video for an excellent demonstration of how to work the P2TOGTBl.

How to Decrease Without Leaving Holes

One of the most common beginner questions is: “How do I decrease without leaving a hole?”

Holes often happen because you are inserting the needles in a different way than required, or slipping stitches or wrapping the yarn the wrong way. To a new knitter, knitwise and purlwise can seem unimportant, but the small details make the difference!

Here are my explanations of common mistakes and how to avoid holes when working decreases:

• K2TOG/P2TOG: Be careful not to drop one of the two stitches, which will not only result in a hole, but also a ladder. When you put your needle through the two stitches, it's easy to think you have picked up both stretches of yarn, when you have actually missed one.

  • Likewise, it's easy to not fully 'catch' the stretch of yarn and maybe work it split, resulting in a weird hole.

  • The best way to avoid this is to practise decreasing on a swatch to get a good feel for all decrease techniques!

• SSK: If you pull too hard when slipping stitches, you will stretch a hole between the slipped stitches and the next stitches you work.

  • Avoid it by trying to maintain even tension across all stitches — a good way to do this is to work your stitches more towards the tips of the needles, being careful not to drop any!

• You have created an extra stitch: Often new knitters are so focused on what they are doing with the stitches on their left-hand needle that they accidentally wrap their working yarn around the right-hand needle causing an accidental yarn over which means a hole in your work.

  • To avoid this, check where your working yarn and remember if you are knitting it should be behind your right-hand needle, if you are purling it should be in front.

• Tension issues: Watch out for stretching out the working yarn between decreases. This can happen because you are focused on the stitches you want to decrease and not the previously worked stitches.

  • To minimise this issue, try to keep your stitches equally distributed across the needles and if need be, give your working yarn a very gentle 'tug' after working your decrease to tighten up looser stretches of yarn (Remember: not too hard on a SSK to avoid forming an extra hole!)

    
    

My ultimate suggestion is, keep practising! Practise makes 'perfect' and tension will even out with plenty of experience. As you knit more, you'll also start to recognise mistakes when they happen and fix them asap.

Choosing the Neatest Decrease

Here is an example of a small swatch that I worked to practice and play around with the right-leaning underarm decreases on The Olive Top pattern. You can see how that column of knit stitches cuts rightwards across the central stitches.

Not all decreases look the same, and that’s the point. Designers use them for symmetrical shaping.

The neatest method depends on what your pattern calls for. But generally speaking you want to knit your decreases in the direction the fabric is 'shrinking'. This will result in a neat line of knit stitches that 'cuts' across the others, especially when worked on every other row.

If you want to see the decrease lean in action and get an idea of what is neat, Nimble Needle's mega blog post on knitting decreases is the place to look!

How to Evenly Decrease Across a Row

Sometimes a pattern will instruct you to “decrease by X stitches evenly across the next row”. This is common in older, vintage patterns:

E.g. You have 58 stitches on your needle, you need to decrease by 8 stitches.

To do this, you simply:

1. Count and double check the starting number of stitches on your needle (or the section you need to decrease into)!

2. Divide the number of stitches you have by the number of decreases you need. E.g. 58 divided by 8 = 7.25. This would mean that you need to decrease every 7.25 stitches, which is not possible....

   1. To make it possible you round down to seven (8x7=56). So, in this case your first decrease would come on the second stitch of the row.

3. You then knit your decreases on every 7th stitch (or the number you got from your initial calculation) until the end of the row.

Two Top Tips to Help You Here!

Tip no 1: Double check your new stitch count and remaining decreases to make towards the end of the row. Again, using the example above, I have decreased 6 stitches already and have 2 decreases remaining. To work those two decreases, I should have 14 more stitches on my left-hand needle.

Tip no 2: Use stitch markers to mark where your decreases should fall before you start knitting. This keeps spacing neat and reduces counting errors.

To Wrap Up

Getting familiar with and mastering decreases is an essential step towards taking on new knit projects. From comfy hats to sweaters, every shaping detail relies on decrease or increase techniques (link to the mega guide below). Start by practising K2tog and SSK, and their wrong-side equivalents, on a swatch, then look out for where they appear in patterns. With time, you’ll not only be working them neatly for a polished finish, but also be able to adapt patterns to get the fit/shape you want!

What to Learn Next

If you found this helpful, try these other beginner-friendly tutorials:

• How to Increase in Knitting: A Must-Read Beginner Knitters Guide

• Knitting Bind Off: Easy Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

• 4 Beginner-Friendly Knitting Patterns to Learn How To Knit

For trusted external references, check out:

• Purl Soho's Knitting Decrease Tutorial Library

• KnitPro's Quick-To-Read List of Decreases