Category Archives: Knitting Adventures

Wonders In The Desert

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:

My cactus has a little pink crown

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:

Pale pink flowers on the smallest cactus

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.

Knitting In The Dark

To escape the heat we packed ourselves into the car yesterday and drove to Flagstaff. For our outdoors activity of the day, we drove about 15 miles or so north of Flagstaff and got to the Lava River Cave:

Entrance to Lava River Cave in Arizona

This cave is about a mile long and is actually a a lava tube that was formed some 700,000 years ago by the cooling of molting lava from a near by volcano. If you want more details just click the name above the photo.

You go down quite a steep rocky kind of tunnel path and get into the darkness, quite an adventure. The thing that I liked the most about this cave is the temperature it was Cold such a nice change after the long long hot days that we have here these days.

It is of course, quite dark inside:

Sitting inside the Lava River Cave of northern Arizona

To let you see more of the cave I used photoshop:

Lava River Cave

Oh yes and among other things (walking, cooling off, getting all stressed at some very low point of the cave) I also did a bit of knitting while my dearest was busy photographing:

Knitting in the dark

Do you see my very practical knitting pouch:

The most dedicated knitter

It is a fancy bag of a Crown Royal Bottle – an excellent way to make everyone in the family happy :)

And if you are wondering, I made only one small mistake and had to rip off just a few stitches and it is all because of this stitch: Garter Rib in the round, it slows me down all the time and make me rip and knit and knit and rip even in full light, I suspect it just wants my undivided attention that’s all! And no, I don’t usually carry my knitting with me when we hike, I just was not sure I am going to enter the cave (I don’t particularly care for closed dark places) so I took the sock with me and when I saw the entrance and decided to go in I just put it in my pocket,,,

I think this is the weirdest place I ever knitted in, what do you think?