Easter Egg Gnomes

Some people think eggs are just perfect as is. We think eggs are great—but the shape is even better with some embellishments.

In the weeks leading up to Easter, our home is bubbling with enthusiasm for egg-inspired projects. The shape of an egg is a perfect prompt for creative play: shall we paint eggs as bugs or shall we sculpt dinosaur eggs? Shall we dress them as gnomes? Yes, let's do that!

This project is fairly versatile. We used wooden eggs as bases, but you could easily use real blown out eggs. The only other thing you need is felt; everything else is customizable depending on how old your kids are and what you have on hand.

You Will Need:

• egg shapes: wood, plaster, plastic, foam or blown out eggs (if your eggs don’t have a flat base, you can make little stands by cutting a strip of paper and taping the edges together to form a circle)
• felt sheets in different colours
• embroidery thread, needle, buttons and beads for decorating
• wool rovings or cotton balls
• pencils and markers
• hot glue gun and/or white craft glue

Instructions:

1. Make a pattern for a hat that will fit your eggs. It should look like one sixth of a circle with a radius as long as you want the hat to be tall. In other words, if I want to make a hat 3” tall, I draw a circle with that radius on a piece of paper, then cut a sixth out of it. That's the pattern.

The dotted line on my pattern shows allowance for a narrow overlap where I’ll glue the hat into a cone.

Once you’ve made the pattern, transfer it onto the fabric and cut it out.

2. It's easiest to decorate the hats before rolling them up into cones. Use whatever techniques you and your kids feel comfortable with!

I tried embroidering the hats and made little flowers with a “lazy daisy” stitch, then added a hasty hemming stitch around the edges. For older children, it can be a fun little sewing project.

My three-year-old isn't ready to use a needle yet, so he decorated a hat with buttons, gluing them onto the felted surface after a good dip into white glue.

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3. You can hot glue or stitch the edges of the hats to turn them into cones. Afterwards, use a hot glue gun to permanently attach the hats to the eggs.

4. Spread white glue generously over the beard area of the egg and attach little bits of wool rovings or teased-out cotton balls.

For the red and green gnome, we made simple beards. For the yellow and the blue gnomes, we molded wool into moustaches, attached them to pompom noses with a felting needle and hot glued the beards to the wooden faces.

5. Draw the eyes. Again, there are several different ways to do this!

My son chose black and white markers and granted sight to the green and blue gnomes. I did the eyes for the red and yellow fellows with pencil crayons (dark brown, black and white).

6. The last touch is adding the bushy eyebrows. Roll your wool between palms to form strings. Draw a thin, arching line of white glue above the eyes and attach the strands of wool there to form the eyebrows.

Making these gnomes was a fun craft, but it was just the beginning of our fun. My son has a special tenderness for his own creations and likes to include them in his imaginative play. Good thing that these wooden egg gnomes are sturdy enough to be thrown around!

Within a few hours of being created, the gnomes had been taken on a space mission in homemade rockets and had skyscrapers built for them out of wooden blocks.

When Easter comes, we plan to involve them in our Easter hunt. After all, gnomes are famous for their fondness of treasure!