About the LB Triangle Shawl

Several knitters have commented that they would never have looked at this pattern if they hadn't seen my pictures. Thanks for the compliments, friends! This is fast and easy and you will have the pattern memorized by the end of the first repeat. So I thought I'd write down some useful stuff about this so-versatile pattern.

Ya gotta love Lion Brand! Well, their efforts at helping to fund knitting as a great hobby and as something to contribute to folks in need are pretty good, even if they do make that gods-awful Homespun yarn I hate and some really fugly free patterns. They continue to support Warm Up America, collecting blanket squares, and they are a big supporter of the Prayer Shawl ministries, as I understand it. (Using Homespun yarn, of course!)

These two different URLs take you to different pattern pages, even though they are both the same pattern.

This ugly gray version is the one I've been using all this time, so I was surprised to see the purplish one.
http://cache.lionbrand.com/patterns/khs-triangleShawl2.html







This purplish one looks different, though it is EXACTLY the same pattern, because the model is wearing the shawl with the purl (private or wrong) side out. It is much easier to see the eyelet pattern, though! http://cache.lionbrand.com/patterns/60301.html










Yardage and Acrylic Yarn Lore
This pattern calls for 2 skeins of Homespun, worked on size 13US needles. I've done this with 2-3 skeins of Jiffy (a fuzzy acrylic), worked with variegated acrylic or not, and about 2.5 skeins of Caron's Simply Soft. The Simply Soft took more since it is a smaller-gauge yarn. I think I used size 9 or 10US needles for all the shawls I've made.

For knitters, the yarn requirements as stated don't mean as much as it does to people who are also crocheters, since, for reasons completely unknown to me, most of the craft-store acrylic yarns are usually sold by ounces and the crochet patterns are written as needing X ounces of Y yarn. Also, variegated and other multi-colored yarns are sold in lower-weight/lower-yardage skeins, though usually at the same price. Paton's is leading a s-l-o-w movement to adding yardage to skein bands. In the meantime, you can always check the yardage info at the companies' websites or www.knitting-warehouse.com which carries most of the craft-store yarns at nice discounts.

OK, Homespun generally comes in 6oz/185yd skeins, so 2 are 370yds. Jiffy skeins are between 2.5 and 3.0oz/115 and 135 yards each. Simply Soft is the big switch-artist; those skeins come in as little as 4oz/208yds and as much as 6oz/330yds. Big merchants like JoAnn's often have 'proprietary' put-ups, at different weights and therefore different yardages than the 'standard'.

And you who knit with 'LYS' type yarns thought figuring out the yardage in patterns calling for discontinued yarn was a PITA! Off the top of my head, I can tell you that you're going to need at least 24 oz of worsted-weight acrylic to make a 30x40in lapghan, just in case you were interested, lol!! When my seniors are pawing through our stash of donated, no-name, no-label skeins of acrylic yarns, finding enough of any one or two or three coordinating colors to make a lapghan can be a major challenge!!! LOL!

BTW, if you know a new knitter who wants beginning-to-knit info online, the stuff at Lion Brand is not too shabby. They have a downloadable PDF with 60 pages of info, including close-up line drawings.