Making A Sunflower Gnome

We in the Southern Hemisphere are, of course, still in summer, so I thought I would make a little sunflower gnome to grace the nature table.

Some of the photos are a bit off as it is quite late at night here and the flash makes everything look a bit wrong!

She started out as this little peg body.

I don't have any photos of the next few steps as I had already half made her before I decided to blog about her!

The next steps are like the directions in this tutorial on flower fairies from Wee Folk Art. I changed the shape of her petals to make them longer, more pointed and not quite so 'puffy'.

The hat is made like the gnome hats in the book Feltcraft by Petra Berger.


Her hair is just some brown wool roving, glued in place, then twisted to make the pigtails.

To draw her little face, I just used Legoman's markers and Ferby pencils for the cheeks, using these basic directions.

Don't you love the dinosaur egg he keeps his pencils in? He had one of those build your own dinosaur kits and it came in this egg. Even though it is plastic, it looks kinda natural and he just loves having his pencils in a dinosaur egg. He thought he was very clever to repurpose the egg as he really wanted to keep it.


To make her sunflower, I used the directions here. The Living Crafts blog is an absolute treasure trove of gorgeous crafts to make. I subscribe to the magazine and I love it!

The leaves and stem are made in two different shades of green. I used the darker one to cover the stem and for the main leaves. I then cut some smaller 'leaves' to place in the middle of the dark green leaves.



The stem is a pipe cleaner, doubled over to the length I desired. I cut a thin strip of dark green felt, covered one side in PVA craft glue and wrapped it tightly around the pipe cleaner.

The light green leaf was glued onto the larger leaf. Then the leaves and sunflower were just glued onto the stem. I will see if this will hold up or whether it would be best to put a few stitches through the leaves and sunflower into the felt on the stem to keep them in place.

Put the two together and you have a sunflower gnome!

Apologies for the rather bedraggled looking gum blossoms in the background! We went to the park today and there is a huge pink flowering gum (my favourite gum tree) overhanging the playground. My rule at the park is that you may collect anything that has fallen naturally and it was quite windy last night. So we had quite a collection of gum nuts, blossoms and leaves to bring home.

And I just love them as they remind me of my very favourite book growing up, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. One of the characters was called Little Ragged Blossom and she wore a gum blossom skirt.

Isn't she too cute? And I even found a pattern for knitted gumnut baby finger puppets.