Photograph by Dai Sugano

Elisabetta Zanardi (left) and Marilyn Turner have been business partners for four years.

Local yarn and button shop no longer a best kept secret

By Shari Kaplan

One of Los Gatos' best-kept secrets is well hidden on a cozy, quiet mezzanine at 24 N. Santa Cruz Ave., an address it shares with its downstairs neighbor, Tercera Gallery. According to the secret-keepers--who would much prefer the secret be out--many visitors filter through Tercera Gallery without realizing the treasure trove located just above their heads.

That trove is Elisabetta, a small yarn and notion shop that had its genesis many years ago on Main Street. Seven years ago, improving business dictated that owner and longtime Los Gatan Elisabetta Zanardi move to a bigger, more centrally located space.

"We're a little hard to find, but we're worth it," Zanardi says with a smile.

The most striking feature of the shop is its shelves upon shelves of brilliant yarn, where the rolls are neatly organized according to color. Most are hand-dyed imports from Italy.

"We do everything by color because I think more people have a color in mind than a texture," says Marilyn Turner, Zanardi's business partner of four years. "The yarns are so wonderful that you don't even need to knit anything complicated to have something beautiful."

Turner says sometimes customers come in with an idea for a piece of knitwear but no pattern. That's no problem, as the women are happy to design custom garments and have them knitted by their perennially patient machines. Customers who already have the skill--and time--to knit can consult with Zanardi and Turner, purchase the right color and texture of yarn and make the garment themselves.

"Most of the yarns can be used on machines as well as by hand. It's pretty unlimited; you're really only limited by your imagination," Zanardi says.

"There's been a resurgence of knitwear out there. Knitting is also making a comeback; I think because we spend a lot of time waiting--waiting for planes, waiting for people, waiting for traffic," Zanardi says.

With a chuckle, Turner adds that one customer actually brings knitting needles and yarn into the car and uses the time at each stoplight to add a few stitches.

Complementing the shop's yarn and knitting business is a collection of hundreds of vintage and contemporary buttons in all shapes, sizes and colors, made from mediums such as plastic, clay, metal, wood, bone, ceramic, velvet, glass, raku and cloisonné. There's also a wall of knitting notions and a selection of pattern and fashion books from which customers can get ideas.

Zanardi also uses the shop as home base for developing her private label of knitwear, whose final versions are then produced in New York. Elisabetta is also the venue for sample sales, knitting classes and--on the first Friday of each month--a "knitters' happy hour" from 4 to 7 p.m., in which kindred spirits knit and visit together while partaking of wine and hors d'oeuvres.

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