When 25 Women & a Civil Engineer Decide To Build an 18-Foot Christmas Crochet Tree Together

An eighteen-foot Christmas tree stands inside the Museum of Goa this season, and it does something most festive installations don’t: it avoids plastic entirely. No PVC needles. No synthetic tinsel. No imported ornaments. What gives it presence instead is yarn, crocheted into more than a thousand individual pieces and stitched together by hand.

Advertisment

Add The Better India As A Trusted Source

The tree exists because a group of people decided to make it exist. Twenty-five women from across Goa crocheted every component. When the pieces were ready but had nothing to hold them up, a civil engineer stepped in and built the metal frame, donating the structure and the logistics needed to move it. The museum’s curator made space for it, backed the idea, and allowed the work to unfold without compressing it into a spectacle.

The women did not outsource labour. The engineer did not bill for materials. The museum did not treat the tree as a prop. Each part depended on the other, and none of them functioned without trust.

The result is a Christmas tree that glows without shine. Its surface is uneven by design because it was made in different homes, by different hands, over weeks. The absence of plastic doesn’t make it minimal; it makes the work visible. You can see where one piece ends and another begins. You can see time in it.

And that alignment, between women whose work is often kept indoors, a civil engineer who chose to support without conditions, and a museum willing to hold the outcome, is what holds the tree up.

Someone near you says it reminds them of their grandmother’s house. Someone else runs their fingers lightly across a patch, as if checking whether it’s real.

It is.

This is Goa’s first large-scale crochet Christmas tree, an installation created by The Crochet Collective, Goa, led by Sheena Pereira, Sharmila Majumdar, and Sophy V Sivaraman, and made by more than twenty-five women who came together over three months to build something none of them could have made alone.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this big,” Sophy admits, laughing. “But then again, none of us knew how big it would become.”

Where the idea began

The idea didn’t start with Christmas. It started with crochet.

Sophy had never crocheted before this year. On her grandson’s first birthday, she decided she wanted to make him a blanket. She asked around in Goa and was introduced to Sheena Pereira, who was part of an online crochet group formed during the COVID years, a way for women to stay connected when everything else had shut down.

“Sheena told me she had a dream,” Sophy recalls. “She wanted to take this online group offline. And she had always imagined making a large crochet tree.”

Sophy didn’t hesitate. “I said yes immediately. I like communities coming together for a common purpose.”

Sharmila Majumdar entered the story next. She had been crocheting for years, mostly at home. She didn’t know Sophy or Sheena. She wasn’t looking for a collective. But when Sophy reached out, something about the idea stayed with her.

“I didn’t know them from Adams,” Sharmila says. “But I came on board.”

That decision changed the course of the project.

A craft that lived in cupboards

Crochet has always been part of Goan life. Introduced by the Portuguese in the 15th century, it was taught to women as domestic craft. Over generations, it became something learned early, practised often, and spoken about rarely.

“Most of us learned from our mothers or grandmothers,” Sharmila says. “And most of us worked alone.”

Jennifer Fernandes, one of the women who worked on the tree, has been crocheting for over fifty years. Others picked it up as children. For many, it became a stress-buster, something to do with the hands while the rest of life carried on.

“You crochet, and then you put your work into cupboards,” Sharmila says. “That’s it.”

The collective changed that.

When Sheena shared the idea with her crochet group, interest trickled in. Then it grew. Eventually, twenty-five women committed to the project. Many had never met before. Their first meeting was a Zoom call on 14 August 2025.

“We hadn’t even seen each other in person,” Sharmila says. “But we started.”

Starting without certainty

They didn’t have a venue. They didn’t have funding. They didn’t even know how large the tree would be.

What they did have was yarn, time, and a shared willingness to try.

“We decided to begin anyway,” Sharmila says. “We felt the place would come.”

By the time they had crocheted 800 squares, the tree still had nowhere to stand. The metal framework had arrived, donated entirely by a civil engineer, Laxmikant, who believed in the project enough to cover the structure, transport, and logistics without charging a rupee.

“He’s just a regular civil engineer,” Sophy says. “Not a fancy guy. But without him, this tree wouldn’t exist.”

Eventually, the Museum of Goa opened its doors. The tree became part of Where We Gather, a curation of collaborative community projects within the Festivals of Goa.

The work intensified.

Inside the making

Much of the assembly happened at Sharmila’s home. There was no fixed schedule. A WhatsApp message would go out. Whoever could come, came.

“There was food. Tea. Coffee. Music,” Sharmila says. “And a lot of laughter.” Hundreds of individual crochet pieces had to be stitched onto the metal frame, one by one. The work demanded focus. Hands moved steadily. Conversations unfolded around colours, families, and childhoods.

Then the monsoon intensified. “There was cyclonic weather,” Sharmila says. “We wrapped the tree in plastic.” When there was a break in the rain, women showed up anyway. Someone would say they had an hour. Maybe less. They would unwrap a section, stitch a few more squares, then cover it again.

One afternoon, ladders were up, clouds gathered, and the first drops began to fall. Someone shouted from the back. The plastic came out. Everyone got drenched. They went inside, made coffee, sat together, and watched the rain.

“I still get goosebumps thinking about it,” Sharmila says.

When mistakes became meaningful

At one point, they realised the squares were too small.

“We had miscalculated,” Sophy says. “We didn’t have time to order more yarn.” So they used what they had. Everyone dipped into their personal yarn collections. Old skeins. Leftovers. Colours that didn’t match.

“That’s why you see unexpected shades,” Sophy says. “Pink. Orange. Everything.” It changed the tree. It also changed what the tree stood for. “There’s no plastic here,” Sharmila says. “No factory-made decorations. Just what we already had.”

What began as a logistical problem became the project’s strongest statement.

More than an installation

By the time the tree was installed, something else had taken shape. A community.

“Now we’re not alone,” Sharmila says. “We’ve found each other.”

The women who worked on the tree — Andria Reny Afonso, Alicia D’Souza, Arlene Saldanha, Carol Braganza, Celia Menezes, Deepa Bharne, Desiree Albuquerque, Elvina Mendes Sequeira, Ermelina Pereira, Freda Coutinho E D’Souza, Hilda Maria Vaz, Iris Menezes, Jennifer Fernandes, Lalita Braganca, Louisa Rebello, Lorna Menezes, Michelle Da Costa Gomes, Minnette Andrade, Queenie Furtado, Thresa Dias, Yasmin BM Abranches, and others — brought more than skill to the project.

They brought time. Care. Presence. For many, this was the first time their crochet had left their homes.

What remains

This tree will not last forever. It isn’t meant to. But the thing it has set in motion will.

The women are already talking about what comes next. About installations. About finding ways to keep working together. About ensuring crochet doesn’t return to cupboards. Sophy has a phrase she keeps returning to.

“You have to like being copied,” she says. “Do things so well that others want to replicate them.”

Standing in front of the tree, you understand what she means.

I met some of the women behind the tree at a crochet pop-up at the Museum of Goa. They weren’t there to “showcase a craft” in the soft-focus way handmade work is often packaged; they were there to sell, and they ran their tables like people who know exactly what their time costs.

What you saw, again and again, was how thoroughly they dismantled the cliché of the crocheter as a quaint hobbyist. These were professional women, imaginative, sharp about value, comfortable with money talk, and still generous with their stories. It made the tree feel less like a seasonal installation and more like a marker of where Goa is heading: culture that can earn, sustainability that isn’t performative, and entrepreneurship that grows from skill rather than spectacle.

If you’ve ever held a crocheted piece and felt the weight of time in it, this tree will make you rethink deco as a concept.

A different way to think about festive décor

Artificial Christmas trees, often marketed as reusable, are typically made of PVC and metal composites. When discarded, they cannot be processed through standard recycling systems in India. NGOs working on waste management have repeatedly flagged festive décor as a low-visibility but high-volume waste stream, one that escapes regulation because it is seasonal and fragmented across households.

Against this backdrop, the Crochet Collective’s tree offers a materially different approach. Made entirely from yarn, much of it reused from personal supplies, it avoids plastic altogether. More importantly, it reframes festive décor as something that can be made, repaired, repurposed, and eventually dismantled without waste, rather than consumed and discarded.

This shift matters not because it solves India’s plastic crisis, but because it shows what alternatives can look like when skill, time, and community replace convenience. In a cultural moment where sustainability is often reduced to branding, the tree stands as a working example of how tradition, labour, and environmental responsibility can intersect, without spectacle, and without waste.

All pictures courtesy The Crochet Collective