Knitting... with pencils?

Lucy Lu is coming along nicely, as you can see:
Just a few more inches until I bind off the back, and start work on the two fronts. By the way, I'm not sure if I linked to the pattern yesterday..

Speaking of, there are a few things in the pattern that are keeping me on my toes. For one thing, I had never done drop stitch before, so that was fun. (So easy, too!) But the weird thing, to me, is the way I was doing the decreases for the armholes. There was the normal binding off of stitches at the beginning, but then I had to actually use a cable needle when I was decreasing one stitch at each end! The instructions are here:

Dec Row 1 (RS): K2, sl 2 sts to cn and hold in BACK, k1, k2tog from cn, k to
last 5 sts, sl 1 st to cn and hold in FRONT, ssk, k1 from cn, k2.

Basically, it seems that I was doing it so that one stitch was crossing in front of the two stitches that were being knit together. Was this just to make it "fancier"? Was that to make it pull in a little more? Or was it to cover some perceived blemish that occurs (and that I have never noticed myself) when two stitches are knit together? I'm mystified, but I obediently followed the pattern. Now I'm going to have to examine other knitted things to see how different it looks.. and whether they do this in the stuff you buy off the rack (because I think that I *have* seen that kind of stitch on at least one shirt that I can think of..)

Yes, I think of strange things while I'm knitting, I know.