Making a Gnome - 31 December 2024

Here’s the concluding part of my gnome knitting adventure.

In my previous post I got up to the point where I’m picking up stitches to start the hat brim.

It was a bit difficult to pick up the stitches but my plan was to continue using 3 double pointed needles (dpns) like the ones I use for sock making. In the end I had around 9 stitches per dpn.

As I wanted the brim to be slightly wider than the actual body I decided to increase one stitch at the beginning and end of a dpn and then have a row without increases. In addition I didn’t want the brim to curl up so I used garter stitch.

When you do knitting in the flat, ie just using two knitting needles, garter stitch is easy because it’s ‘knitting’ all rows without purling, when you do knitting in the round you have to do one row of purling to have the garter stitch effect.

I did about 6 rows of garter stitch and then I cast off making sure that the edge wasn’t too tight.

The photo above shows you the hat brim as seen from above with some of the body stuffing in the middle. As you can see it doesn’t look that neat, but that’s okay with me. This is a sort of ‘wooly sketch’.

I thought the profile photo of the project above looked very funny and refined. In fact I did consider making a gnome with a beret as the brim reminded me a bit of that sort of hat.

I needed to pick up more stitches on the edge again to continue the top of the hat. I used a 2mm crochet hook for that and it was quite a fast process. This time I picked up 8 stitches and then I transferred them to a dpn. I picked up 24 stitches altogether which were distributed equally.

The first couple of rows were a bit tight but after that it was really just like sock making. I decided to also add stitches to give the hat a bit of fullness but this is where I lost track and just improvised.

As the project was so small I then quickly needed to start decreasing to start on the point of the hat. Besides that I also wanted to make the point of the hat a bit crooked to the side. I appreciate that I was a bit too ambitious trying to fit in too many features but that’s how I did it.

I was pleased with the overall result and I even made the gnome stand. I then had to choose a good-looking twig to use as a prop. I took Gnome for a stroll and placed him in a suitable scene to take a photo. I’m happy how this turned out - next time I'll use more muted colours.

Hope your 2025 is full of happiness, health and harmony !

Thank you for reading !