I have only been playing chess on a daily basis for a few months now, so I am a pretty weak player. The following game was my first encounter with the King's Gambit. I was black and I declined the Gambit because I value position much more than material and one of my biggest peeves is stacking pawns. I was wondering if you all could give me some suggestions on how I may have dealt with the situation more effectively. Thanks for the feedback!

 

If you can think of any suggestions outside of the gambit opening as well, please feel free to respond. Thanks again.

well, you're lucky he wasn't a great player and that he gave you a knight for free!

you have to either learn a good king's gambit defense (like the fischer or modern) or a counter gambit like d5. unfortuntaly you can't just play the king's gambit "naturally" by making normal moves or you end up badly.  

  I always accept the gambit because that's what Bobby Fischer did. It's not about winning material, even though you're surrendering the center(position). It's about trying to weaken the White King's position and attacking the Kingside while the King is exposed.

The mistakes were generally made by white here. I have never seen that way of rejecting the king's gambit before, but as far as I can tell, it seems fine. 

It looked like white was kind of confused by the fact that you didnt take the pawn. there are a few places where different moves could have been played to gain a better position, but in agreement with TraglorfBob, most of the mistakes were made by white.

 this is a normal king's gambit declined, i would usually accept the gambit though.

i honestly cant find any errors in your side of the game.

the only thing is that not accepting the gambit pawn leads to white having the f-file half-open.

You played the classical line of KGD, which is recommended in a book by Marin which isn't a bad line at all.  In fact was a reasonable quality game, at least by standards of recent posts. You could have played 5...Nc6 or Nd7 because after white's threat 6Bf7ch KxB 7Ng5 have 7... QXN,but maybe 5...Qf6 is a playable move too.