How To Make Adorable Nature Pinecone Gnomes For Kids

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Inside: One of our favourite pine cone crafts for kids are making gnomes for all seasons that we use as toys or pinecone decorations.

I find autumn is the most inspirational season for many fall craft ideas for kids and opportunity to colour your home in to beautiful natural orange, red and golden decorations from outside.

This is also great way for kids to spend more time outside in nature, participating in the process of collecting leafs and nature fruits while learning about this magic season.

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How To Make Simple Pine Cone Gnomes For Kids

Materials you will need you’ll need:

4 pinecones or you can collect them from nature
4 felt balls for gnome heads 0.5 inch diameter (you can make your own (same principle) or use wooden balls with premade faces)
felt of your choice for gnome hats
natural colour thread ( I use divided embroidery thread) and needle
hot glue
coloured pens for eyes and mouth – optional

If using pinecone from nature be sure to bake them in the oven for 45 minutes at 400 F to dry and debug them.

Glue felt ball – head (or wooden) on a bottom of each pinecone.

At this point you can make eyes and mouth with coloured pens on a felt heads. Or you can leave their faces empty which will give your child opportunity to imagine their facial expressions. It’s up to you. I’ve decided to put faces as I’ve just get my new doll making coloured pencils so wanted to dry them out.

Now you will make felt hats for your gnomes. Cut felt in a shape shown in the picture below. I used balls diameter 0.5 inch and piece of felt was three times longer, 1.5 inch.

Make cone shape around finger and sew edges together with blanket stitch.

After you made hats put your little gnomes together by gluing hat on each gnome’s head.

If you want to leave gnomes like that, either for seasonal decoration or play you may. If you wanna hang them, follow step bellow to place thread they will hang on.

Put thread with node in the end through gnomes hat using needle as on photo and leave thread a bit longer than you would want them to hang. It will be easier to tie them on branch later on.