Philadelphia crochet artist’s yarn-bomb installations go viral online

A giant sunny-side-up egg on Walnut Street and a six-foot-tall Jason Kelce crochet piece helped turn Nicole Nikolich’s Philadelphia yarn-bombs into the kind of sidewalk surprise that spreads fast online. CBS Philadelphia has been highlighting her life-sized crochet creations as they travel from neighborhood streets to social feeds, with Nikolich working under the name Lace in the Moon.

Nikolich’s own site says she grew up in Northern Virginia, earned a BFA in Fashion from Virginia Commonwealth University, and moved to Philadelphia in 2016. She learned to crochet from YouTube in 2017 and began yarnbombing Philadelphia streets as a way to cope with her mental health. That origin story still sits under the work, even as the pieces have grown larger, brighter, and more recognizable block by block.

The city has been seeing her public art for years. Streets Dept documented a 2018 yarnbomb on 11th Street between Callowhill and Noble streets that promoted mental health awareness, and The Philadelphia Inquirer later covered a Jason Kelce and Phillie Phanatic yarnbomb display near the Italian Market. Nikolich’s Instagram profile lists about 77K followers and describes her as a crochet artist making large scale crochet installation art, a label that fits the scope of the pieces now circulating online.

Her website says the early work explored mental health, pop culture, and LGBTQ+ issues, and it also says she has worked with brands such as Microsoft. That range helps explain why the current wave of attention feels bigger than a single viral moment. Nikolich’s installations are part street art, part fiber art, and part neighborhood marker, built to be seen in motion from the curb, not just framed on a wall.

For home crocheters, the most portable idea here is the simplest one: a single bold motif that reads from across the room. Shadow crochet, also called illusion crochet, is the closest off-the-shelf technique for that effect, and it translates cleanly into wall hangings, garment panels, and small yarn-bombing projects that need to punch through at a glance. Philadelphia is just giving that visual logic a much larger stage, one giant egg and one six-foot Jason Kelce at a time.