The perils of beginning to knit

Long story short, I wanted to learn to knit thanks to the internet. Ah, it's such a wonderful tool sometimes.

For my birthday, my boyfriends mother bought me the Denise interchangeable needle set since regular length needles were hell on my hands, and I really wanted the pink cords. I was coveting those for all sorts of projects I want to do, so I'm very glad I got them, they work so beautifully. A few skeins of cheap yarn later, and I'm now working on my first 'real' project: a cotton washcloth with a puppy dog paw print found here. And that's where the perils being!

I think I've unraveled the sucker 3 times so far, and only gotten as far as the 8th row, because somehow I kept adding stitches accidentally. After much internal cursing, and throwing the boy cat off of my lap a few times, I have figured out the main reasons I'm adding stitches.

1) At the beginning of a row, I wasn't orienting my work properly. By forcing the yarn to the back of the needle, it looked like I was up one stitch. Now I know to tug it down to properly orient it. That one only took a TON of frustration to figure out!

2) This project is my first foray into purling. Very simple once I got the hang of it, but the first stitch between knit and purl was adding a stitch, and I didn't realize it until I'd count my stitches and find I was up to 40 from 36, ugh!

The problem ended up being that I actually had to move the yarn to the front of the work from the back. None of the video's I'd seen about purling had addressed this, so I may write into my favorite YouTube knitting / crafting channel (CyberSeams) and see if they'd do a quick vid about common mistakes us newbies make :) I would if I were more photogenic lmao

So hopefully over the next few days I'll finish that darn washcloth and move on to something a little larger.