We're making flowerpot gnomes. Here's what you'll need:

A small clay flower pot, yarn, acrylic paints, a large needle, a hot glue gun, some string, large scissors, and wet wipes.




The pot will become the gnome's hat; the yarn will be his beard. Let's make the beard first.

Start wrapping yarn around your outstretched hand until you've made 50-75 wraps. Remove the coils from your hand, cut off the excess, and tie the middle tightly. Cut through both ends; you should have a floppy 'moustache'. Attach about six inches of string to the tied centre, and tie the other end of the string to the large needle. Put this aside for now.


Now it's time to paint the pot. This will be the gnome's hat; you only need to paint the outside. Be creative.

The acrylic paints will dry quickly, but you'll have time to clean up a little before proceeding; make sure there's no paint on your fingers.

The paint on the pot must be completely dry before the next step.

Use the glue gun to lay down a wide band of glue around the hole inside the bottom of the pot. Then put a wide layer all around the inside rim of the pot. Work quickly so the glue doesn't dry.

(The needle is needed to run the string through the hole without your hand touching the glue, but be careful; hot glue burns can be painful!)

Do that; run the needle and string through the hole, from the inside, and pull hard on the string so that the yarn is pulled completely into the pot.

This is what it should look like. You can remove the needle. Give the glue a few minutes to dry.

Hang the pot by the string. If there are any dangly bits of yarn longer than the others, cut them off.

To ensure that this beard stays in place, you can reach up into it, pushing the strands aside, and lay down a large dollop* of glue in the centre.

*Dollop is an accepted scientific unit of measurement. One dollop = three dribbles.


Our instructors taking a well-earned coffee break.


The final step is to add a nose; pom-poms work well. You can also add stick-on googly eyes if you wish, although Kayla insists that gnomes do not have eyes; she offered no proof for this, so I suspect she just made it up.






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Lesson and instructing by the indomitable Kayla, assisted by Linde
Photography, HTML, graphics & design by Bill Willis 2023