Stuffing is showing through my stitches. What went wrong?

Hold the empty piece up to a window. If you can see daylight through the gaps between stitches, stuffing will come through. At amigurumi-tight gauge in DK on a 3.5 mm hook, an empty piece is essentially opaque; if yours is not, the hook is at least half a millimetre too large.

The test is worth doing at the base, before you have worked four hours. A piece that fails it will still fail after stuffing, and no amount of careful stuffing placement fixes a fabric that lets light through.

Pull the stuffing into pieces the size of a walnut, not a fist. Small pieces let you control density locally and they do not leave voids that later collapse and leave the fabric slack.

Add stuffing in three or four passes, shaping with a blunt chopstick from the inside after each one. Push the stuffing against the walls gently from the inside out rather than cramming from the opening down. Work the piece between your palms after every pass to keep it round.

If the yarn is white or cream and the stuffing is grey polyester, show-through is a contrast problem, not a density problem. Line the piece: cut a square of white cotton jersey slightly larger than the cavity, push it in before the stuffing and smooth it against the walls.

Never use dark fibre fill behind pale yarn for a gift. It will look fine in indoor light and grey through the fabric in daylight, which is when the person you made it for will first look at it properly.