I’m a relatively new knitter and I’m starting my first hat, which is this:
I just finished the first row of k2tog, yfwd, and ended up with 69 stitches left instead of the original 72. Is this normal, or is it possible that I forgot to yfwd in a few places? And if I did, can I just add those stitches when I knit the next row? Or do I have to undo the entire row (which would be horrible because I don’t know how to do that).
You may have forgot the YOs and if you did, just pick up the yarn between the sts where they should be and knit into them on the next round. You can look at the round you just did and name the sts from the beginning of it to see where you might have left them out, then mark the spots with a safety pin or paper clip. It’s not that hard to take out your knitting (though I don’t think you’ll have to this time), there’s videos on the Tips page under Fixing Mistakes when you actually have to.
I went through the whole row several times and could only find one place where I missed a stitch, which would bring my total number of stitches to 70…Looking at the pattern, I don’t see how that could have happened, but it certainly makes sense, because the hat needs to start decreasing somewhere besides the very end in order to be a hat, right? So should I only have 70 stitches at this point?
No. You do only decrease toward the end, so you may have overlooked 2 spots where you should have done a YO and didn’t, or you actually only CO 70 sts instead of 72. You should be able to go ahead with the 70 sts though, do some more rounds, count the sts after every k2tog, yo round to make sure you’re not losing some more.