knittinghelp.com and "branching out"

So this morning, I remembered reading about knittinghelp.com with videos to show you how to knit certain stitches. I'm having such a problem with ribbing so I figured I'd check it out. I knew it had to do with how I carried the yarn, but I didn't even think of the possibility of bringing the yarn around to the left, counterclockwise. I had been bringing it further clockwise, kind of pulling the stitch on the needle to get it to the front. That made them all bunchy and weird.

So I pulled out the patons katrina shrug and I'll start it again soon (I think) now that I know how to rib. But when I was on the knitting help website, I got more excited about the other things it taught -- ssk, s1 k1 psso -- stuff I have seen in a lot of the lace patterns in my stitch book but didn't know how to do! Watching the videos helped me figure it out, and then I remembered the suggestion from one of the groups about "Branching Out" from knitty.com so I printed it out and began it with Classic Elite Bamboo in Citrine.

I had a lot of trouble having the right amount of stitches for my first repeat, and I kept on having to k2tog or yo to get the right amount (of course messing up the pattern and particularly the edges), but by the second repeat I had figured out how to get the right number of stitches on the needles during the fancy slip stitches. I remember as I am righting that there was a whole section of the stitch book on slip stitches, so I might be able to do those, too. Anyway, I finally saw the leaf pattern emerging by the second repeat, but after I took a couple of pictures (only one of which really came out).



I decided to rip it and start fresh. I'm not going to do that now because I'd like to get some stuff organized, both in my house and in my head. I'm going to post to the livejournal groups to thank people for their suggestions.