I am so envious when I see all your green yards and beautiful flowering gardens, it is so hard to have it here in the desert. So, you can probably imagine my joy, when I looked out of our office window and spotted those:

and then I realised there is some more to look at a bit further away, the second one was amazing, the flowers were almost larger then the little cactus they grew on:

I spotted quite different wonders in our desert when we visited Tucson, Arizona this week.

The first one was The Kiwi Knitting Company This shop is in a lovely small house and consists of many rooms each dedicated to a certain yarn type and then there is one (or maybe 2) with patterns, books and accessories, it also has a very large inviting room with a sofa and a big table, I guess this is where they have their classes and other activities. The yarn selection was impressive with a few things that I did not see before, the one that stuck in my memory is a beautiful hand dyed alpaca of the Frog Tree. The yarn that I could not resist this time was the new Regia Design Line by Caffe Fassett , the colour that made me succumb to my weakness is: Regia Mirage Earth 4254 (it is already on the needles so it did not change the status of my stash, right? sort of,,,). The owner was friendly, informative and not pushy at all and I really enjoyed chatting with her. She made Joe really happy by having a wireless internet connection so he sat in the big room and I was free to do what I like to do in those stores (I can’t tell you what exactly it is but I think you can guess). While I was browsing the shelves another client came in and the owner told her: oh what a nice work (she was wearing a beautiful light blue top in some lacy design) and the client responded: it is so nice to be between knitters, all other people want to know where I bought it!

The second one was Purls, it is a Tucson establishment that from some reason I did not check before, apparently the ownership changed recently, the new owner (or one of them I don’t know) was there and was very helpful and friendly with a little bit of a sales person pushiness but not enough to make it a bother. They have an impressive collection of yarns with Habu and other special goodies. Myra the owner introduced me to the yarn that I had to have in this store, it is called Lacey Lamb of Jade Sapphire Exotic Fibers, it is a very fine lace weight yarn and so soft one must have some of it. I chose a beautiful gray colour and thought it will look great in anne hanson’s Japanese Feather Stole. I wonder how I will manage to knit such a delicate thread but I am not starting it at least until I finish my personal Honey, I am knitting it in the other Anne’s Buckwheat Honey and enjoy every second of it. I almost bought an Habu kit as I am really interested in trying to knit with their unique yarns but decided to postpone this purchase when Myra told me she will have a trunk show with better selection in October, I am so good.