This incredible Christmas tree was designed and manufactured by incredible women in India’s state of Goa who felt another fake plastic Christmas tree was something the world didn’t need.
Made entirely of crocheted yarn, the community tree was designed to help revive a fading craft, feature women’s labor, and offer a sustainable alternative to plastic-heavy festive décor.
Located inside the Museum of Goa, the tree features more than a thousand individually crocheted squares made by 25 talented women of the Crochet Collective, an inter-generational, inter-continental collaboration that wields this introduced form of craft to help knit a community together.
Brilliantly told by Leila Badyari at The Better India, the story of this Collective effort begins in August, at the group’s first meeting over Zoom. Apart from the three organizers, Sheena Pereira, Sharmila Majumdar, and Sophy Sivaraman, none of the 25 crochet artists had met each other before.
The whole reason for their meeting was a dream that Pereira had about making a crocheted Christmas tree. If the surname here sounds distinctly un-Indian, that’s because Goa was a Portuguese colony, and crochet a direct, 15th century Portuguese import. Another of the 25 women is named Jennifer Fernandes, for example.
The crochet group began online during COVID, but Pereira wanted to take it offline with in-person meetups, and it was the connection with Sivaraman that gave her the impetus. At the Zoom meeting, no one could give an estimate on how big the tree would be, how it would be shaped, or how long it would take to finish.
“We decided to begin anyway,” Majumdar told the Better India. “We felt the place would come.”
And so the 50 skilled hands began their needlework, and as the weeks turned to months, the tree began to take shape. The Collective would meet at Majumdar’s home in Goa. There would be tea, coffee, music, and conversations of days gone by; of family, of childhoods.
Things really accelerated when a local civil engineer quickly welded a conical tree frame out of metal and donated it, along with the transportation, to the Collective without charging a rupee.
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Suddenly, there was something on which to tie the 800 hand-crafted squares, and once they had the tree frame, the Museum of Goa opened its doors to feature the tree squarely in its “We Gather” collaboration.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this big,” Sivaraman admitted, laughing. “But then again, none of us knew how big it would become.”
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The question of size, during the monsoon season, quickly became a problem of size: the squares they had been weaving were too small, but they had used up almost all their yarn and couldn’t start over. So they began using their own yarn collections, or unraveling old pieces they didn’t care for anymore. The result was beautiful, unpredictable, originality.
“That’s why you see unexpected shades,” Sivaraman says. “Pink. Orange. Everything. There’s no factory-made decorations. Just what we already had.”
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