Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Give A Tree A Sweater
Artist brings creative crochet back home
Gina Gallina is a crocheting superstar.” That’s how writer Lara Jo Hightower — a superstar herself — described the artist to lead a 2020 story. At the time, Gallina was crochet-bombing Maxine’s, the popular Fayetteville bar on Block Avenue.
Over the years since her passion for fiber art “got out of hand,” she’s also crocheted an event she called “a Marie Antoinette-meets-Pee-Wee-Herman style ball” that featured six crocheted gowns, wigs and even chandeliers; received attention on a national scale when she got involved with Vogue Knitting Live events — a sort of fan conference for yarn enthusiasts; created a crocheted garden in Springdale… The list goes on and on.
This weekend, the Eureka Springs School of the Arts debuts its first Gina Gallina creation, one of the early installation-style works that originally captured artsy hearts in that community. She is wrapping a tree near the main entrance. It’s a chance to return to Eureka Springs, where the whole crochet explosion began for Gallina, who now lives in Fayetteville.
“Just being in Eureka is important,” she enthuses. “I love everyone at ESSA too. They work so hard bringing the arts to the community. I am thrilled they wanted a tree crocheted. I am honored to be a part of their color.
“Also, the tree that is being crocheted is in the middle of the parking lot, [and] I guess its been bumped into! So this will be like the most beautiful traffic cone ever. But a sweater for this tree!”
“We are very excited to have Gina create something on our campus,” says ESSA Director Kelly McDonough. And “watch for the new spring/summer lineup of classes when you can take a crochet class with the talented Gina Gallina.”
Gallina started to crochet just like most little girls: She learned it from her “nana” when she was 8 years old.
“She would make newborn hats and bibs for special needs children,” she remembers. “Crocheting was her hobby for down time, but it was always done for a purpose. I never knew about patterns. I only knew circles for hats, and squares for bibs.”
Gallina says she crocheted “sporadically” over the years, but it was during an internet outage in 2007 that she picked up a crochet hook to pass the time.
“When I moved back to Eureka Springs in 2011, I rented a cabin in the woods and healed myself by crocheting,” she explains. “Using it as therapy to find myself again — and it just got way out of hand.
“When I was crocheting like a wild woman, I started with a chair and posted it on Facebook,” she continues. “I think I had 12 friends at that time, and everyone ooh’d and aahh’d it. Being a natural ham and attention seeker, the next thing I crocheted was crazier, [and] all of my friends loved that, so I just kept crocheting wilder and wilder, trying to out-do what I did before …
“It just got way out of hand,” she repeats, laughing.
Invited to display her work at the White Street Walk in May 2013, Gallina filled a friend’s living room.
“It looked like an explosion of crochet erupted on her walls and floors,” she remembers. “It was a burst of color. I didn’t expect to love it so much. But seeing it all together was very exciting to me.”
Not content to stop there, Gallina wrapped some White Street trees — and then wrapped some White Street people in crocheted outfits.
“I haven’t stopped since then! In 2013 crochet was ‘grandma art’ [and] I was told more than a few times that I needed a boyfriend or therapy,” she remembers. “I would forever explain boyfriends were what made me crochet for therapy! This IS my therapy.
“My art back then was a little more obscure than it is today,” she adds. “Since the pandemic, crochet is welcomed back, with the younger generation creating plushies and amigurumi, so it’s nice to be understood a wee bit more. I do love to take crochet to a next level and am driven by color and textures. … No matter what I create, you know my purpose is for it to be recognized as crochet.”