A Stitch In Time

Artist ‘yarn bombs’ French Revolution

You name it, and Eureka Springs artist Gina Rose Gallina can make it -- a bicycle, a chocolate cake, a chaise lounge, a bumblebee, a garden, a rainbow, a pair of ruby slippers, even a ballgown.

But her creativity is manifested in a medium few would expect. Gallina is a fiber artist -- specifically, she crochets. And this time, she's given birth to a revolution.

FAQ

‘Yarnolutionary’

And

Ball of Yarn

WHEN & WHERE — 7 p.m. Saturday at The Pressroom in Bentonville with the ball at 9 p.m. at 21c Museum Hotel

COST — Free

INFO — Yarnolutionary on Facebook

NOTE — The artists requests participants dress in light pink, creme or baby blue.

"I am crocheting a Marie Antoinette-meets-Pee-wee Herman style ball -- all in light pink, crème and baby blue," she describes. "I've got six huge ballgowns -- it's taken me a year to work on them -- plus I've crocheted a chandelier, a throne, masks... It's crazy!"

On Saturday, Gallina will invite friends and fans to go down the rabbit hole into a world where everything is covered in yarn. The installation, titled "Yarnolutionary," will be on view starting at 7 p.m. at The Pressroom in Bentonville. Then, at 9 p.m., everyone will move to 21c Museum Hotel for a "Ball of Yarn," where Gallina's creations will come to life.

Jeremy Mason McGraw, an artist, a world-traveled commercial photographer and Gallina's promoter, says it will be a "once in a lifetime event." Odds are, he's right -- and wrong. Gallina may never crochet 18th century French ballgowns again, but she'll likely find something just as dramatic.

"My grandmother taught me and my cousin when I was 8," Gallina says of crocheting. "She was a Sicilian lady -- she tatted, crocheted and knitted bibs for special needs children and hats for newborns. The reason I got artistic with it, rather than following patterns and making baby blankets and afghans, was I've always been poor, lived in the woods, and since I couldn't afford patterns, I'm always making stuff up as I go."

It was at a White Street Walk, when Eureka Springs artists open their galleries to the public, that McGraw saw Gallina's work. She had "yarn bombed" a roomful of furniture and dressed friends in yarn overalls, and he had already been thinking of an art project with yarn. Yarn bombing has been called the newest form of graffiti, covering a tank in Denmark, a bus in Mexico City and the leg of a giant statue in Paris.

Gallina and McGraw worked together on "Yarnography," shown at The Pressroom in August of 2013.

"I was a bit apprehensive," McGraw admits. "What if she couldn't really pull it off on the scale it needed to happen?"

She did, creating everything from food -- not edible, of course -- to flowers to fashion.

"She has such a unique style and this really likeable whimsicality," McGraw says. "What she's doing, no one else is doing. And she's really good talking to people."

She should be. Gallina's night job, as it were, is as a music booker and a musician with the Camptown Ladies, a folk group that's been playing around Eureka Springs for nearly two decades and has been heard on NPR's "Prairie Home Companion." That's her business. Yarn, she says, is her obsession.

"Yarn to me is like paint," she says, "and it comes right off!"

NAN What's Up on 02/27/2015

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