Stitch holder jerry-rig

As seems to happen almost every time I travel, I found myself missing an item needed to continue my craftiness. This time: stitch holder. Usually, I just use scrap yarn as a stitch holder, due to laziness and cheap-ness (I mean, frugality). However, all of the yarn I was using was agglomerated into one big ball--no dice. I searched for solutions in my surroundings. The first thing I spied:

Aha! Maybe some twine? Wire?

I didn't think that something mysterious and sticky called 'Sexauer' would be of any help--but my inner 13-year-old boy did find it amusing. The search continued. In any lab that's been around for a while, even the most immaculate of them tend to accumulate a lot of junk. I struck gold with this drawer:

Not gold, actually. Copper.
Heavy gauge unplied copper wire? Dear diary--jackpot. Copper is very ductile: you can often bend it with no equipment other than your hands.

I started with a straight piece:

Bent it in half, one side a bit longer than the other, then curled the longer side into a loop:

Readjusted by original bend so that I could easily move the unbent side in and out of the loop, but with a little poking through so the stitches would be trapped.

I also filed the ends a bit, just to make sure they wouldn't snag. Here it is in action:

I was feeling quite pleased with myself, but not really seeing any advantage to this as opposed to just a strand of yarn. Then I made an error (naturally) and had to pull the work back out to before where I used the stitch holder--bingo. It was so much easier to get the stitches on and off using a rigid holder, rather than yarn. They slid off like buttah. It's cliche, but necessity is the mother of invention.