There’s gnome place like home this holiday season, and every home seems to be sporting a gnome! I’ll admit, I’m captivated with these little Scandinavian folklore creatures that have taken Christmas by storm. Walk into any home décor store and you’re bound to see gnome dinnerware, gnome towels, miniature and giant gnomes, stuffed gnomes, and ceramic gnomes. Look outside, and you’ll find an adorable greenery gnome, which is exactly what I’m going to teach you to make in this post! It was very easy but very time consuming, so just beware before starting this project. However, I think the end result is completely worth it. Turn on some Christmas music and get working!

Supplies you’ll need:

• Wire tomato cage
• Green floral wire
• Heavy-duty thick wire
• Hot glue gun
• Artificial pine tree, 5-7ft tall*
• 1 yard red felt
• Real potato (or 10″ x 10″ square of beige fabric and handful of pillow stuffing)

*We had a 7ft old, artificial Christmas tree with burned out lights that we planned to throw away, so that became the starting point for this project. Before going out to buy a brand new tree, look on Facebook for people giving away old trees with burned out lights, or Goodwill usually has cheap trees this time of year. Instead of one big tree, you can also use several smaller 3-4ft trees.

Step 1. Disassemble the Christmas tree, cutting off branches and removing any lights. The bigger the tree, the stronger the branches usually, so we ended up using an angle grinder to quickly cut the branches off. Wire snippers easily clipped the light strands and my grandmother-in-law and hubby got to work untangling the lights and branches. It was a team effort!

Step 2. Flip the tomato cage upside down so the top circle wire is on the floor. Using the longest branches first, wrap green floral wire around the branch stem and attach to the tomato cage. You want the branches to touch the floor so it looks like the gnome is standing on the ground. Wrap the second branch next to the first so that it overlaps slightly. Continue around the tomato cage until the bottom is covered.

Step 3. Depending on the length of the branches and the spacing of your tomato cage, you may need to use some heavy wire to create your own ring around the tomato cage, like I did. I wanted a nice fat gnome and if I had tied the next row of branches on the tomato cage ring, it wasn’t going to cover the bottom row enough for my liking. Continue using the green floral wire to tie branches around the tomato cage. Repeat this step again until you can only see the 3 individual stakes on the tomato cage. Your gnome body is finished and now on to the accessories!

Step 4. Determine how low you want the hat to sit on the gnome head and measure the circumference of that area. You want the hat to be slouchy and loose on the gnome. The circumference of mine measured 52” loosely wrapping a cloth tape measure around it. Lay out your yard of red felt (make sure it’s doubled) and mark half of your circumference along one edge. This will be the bottom/opening of your triangle hat. I wanted a long hat to hang over, so I used the entire width of the felt piece and cut a triangle. Sew two sides closed, leaving the bottom open. Flip hat inside out so your seam is inside. Place on top of gnome body. Using the remaining scrap of red felt, cut out two mittens and hot glue to the branches.

Step 5. Now for the nose. You have a couple options ~ use a real potato like you’ll often see when people are making greenery gnomes with real greenery; or make a fake nose like I did so I can store this gnome until next year. If you’re using a real potato, I think your best method is to poke a piece of the heavy wire through it and attach to the tomato cage that way. If you want a fake nose, I laid out a piece of beige fabric, placed a handful of pillow stuffing in the middle, and gathered the fabric around it, hot gluing in place. Then I hot-glued the nose to the tree branches.

There you have it! Your very own greenery gnome! Merry Christmas!