In all my knitted items in-the-round I have never, ever had ladders between my needles.

Not a knitter?  A ladder is what happens to the stitches on the ends of each double-pointed needle when the tension changes. It shows up between your double-pointed needles looking like a dropped stitch.  Click here for ways to avoid this.

I’m not sure what happened this time except that I was using three needles and the working needle instead of four and not pulling the second stitch on the needle as tightly as I should have while I was knitting.  Plus this is knitted inside out and the laddering occurred in the purl section so it wasn’t as noticeable to me.

So the hat will be ripped out until I get to the purl section and I’m either going to use four needles and a working needle or switch to a short circular needle.

What’s your trick to avoid ladders?