Mysterious extras rows while knitting in round

How-to Questions
1

I’ve just started my first ever attempt at knitting a hat with circular needles. I cast on, made sure it wasn’t twisted, and commenced with K1, P1, K1, P1 and so on to do the rib. I have a marker marking the end of the “row”.

As I have finished knitting a number of rows now, I noticed that part of my knitting is looking deeper than another part of it. I thought maybe it was a freakish difference in tension, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. I counted the rows and I have 10 rows in the deep section and only 6 in the “shallow” section.

If I’m knitting around and around, in a spiral, how can I have something weird like this happen? Shouldn’t there only be a 1 row difference between where I’ve been and where I’m going?

Does anyone have an explanation for what has happened? I’m perplexed!

Thanks!

2

Yep, knitting in the round is really knitting in a spiral, so the end of the round is going to be higher than the beginning. However, there should only be one round difference, so you have something else going on there. Probably you set your knitting down and when you picked it up, started going the other direction. When you knit flat and start a row, the yarn will be on the left needle. But when you knit in the round, the yarn will always be on the right needle, just like in the middle of a row of flat knitting.