I was asked the other day about ways to pin a triangle shawl together in front. I haven’t knit one that shape in ages; I personally much prefer the front-and-back arc of my top-down circular ones, and how well they stay on the shoulders on their own, enough to write the book on the subject. But. Back in the Dark Ages, before I sat down with my copies of the newly-republished Barbara Walker books and struggled to teach myself how to knit lace (thank you, Barbara!), I used to knit the very simplest triangle shawls: fine yarn with large needles to make it look open and meshy. Cast on 3, knit into the front and back of the last stitch in each row, stockinette stitch, keep on doing that till you have the size you want and you’re done. Voila. Let the yarn itself be the showpiece.
I made dozens of those. And a dozen or two more. If you use a soft, natural fiber (my biases are showing), and beautiful yarn, what’s not to like. Except for me, as a knitter, after whipping those out one after another for eighteen months. I got screamingly bored, but I’m glad I got so bored: it propelled me to go sweat it through those Stitch Treasury instructions the second I got the chance, and lacework for me took off from there.
Meantime, though. What I gave people with those triangles was a way to hold them together in front so they wouldn’t fall off. I took small, cheap hair elastics–you know, the kind that rip your hair to shreds if you use them very much–and crocheted around them with the leftover yarn until you could no longer see the elastic beneath. At the beginning, I made them very fancy/artsy; since the triangle pattern was so plain, I had to have some fun somewhere, at least! But they got plainer and simpler till all that was left was something like this one here.
Which is an idea that’s useful enough that it occurred to me I ought to share it.
(For me, personally, though, these days I have my treble clef shawl pin, custom-designed by designsbyromi.com to connect my music with my knitting.)