A Gnome and His Home!!

I am not a gnome in the garden kind of girl ( a pink flamingo on the sandy beach, maybe...) But everyone is loving the new movie and I really like polka dots so the cute little mushrooms appeal to me. It got me to thinking about a doing a little afternoon art camp and

A Gnome and His Home came to mind! Or A Gnome and Her Home... 

Some of the little girls wanted to make "girl gnomes."

 All very cute and very easy. A fun project for a birthday party.

I glued a small saucer to a clay pot ( with Liquid Nails and let it dry 24 hours) to make a little "pedestal." My Wal Mart had these nice taupy brown clay pots and I thought they'd look nice with the moss and natural items as well as the red mushrooms and gnome hats. I purchased little birdhouses from JoAnns' for a dollar and cut off the perches. I bought the pointy top birdhouses because we thought gnomes and their pointy hats would fit better :) We used a scrap of black peel and stick fun foam to make a doorway - we placed it over the birdhouse hole and pressed it on. The gnomes are made from the little turned wooden people that come in bags of 8 at Hobby Lobby. They are less than 40 cents each. 

Then the gnome got a coat of paint and a triangle of felt for the hat. The boy gnomes got a white felt beard and girl gnomes got yarn hair. The mushrooms were made from a small amount of air dry clay. ( We used Crayola Model Magic- I love the stuff because it takes paint so well and it's easy to use and it's white !! ) We used a roll of sheet moss that I purchased for 1/2 price with a coupon at JoAnn's to line the saucer. I had a class of 14 so I needed the whole roll but Dollar Tree had small bags that would do one or two gnome homes. Then we just started gluing on twigs, itty bitty pinecones from my yard, scraps of the moss and leaves from some old silk ivy vines I had saved for crafting. We put the gnomes, their homes and some little rocks and branches in the pedestals and the Gnome and His Home was complete. They are super cute and the children loved making them and using all the natural materials - free, so they could use all they wanted. We used Tacky Glue to hold all the chunky natural materials on the houses. They could be displayed on a protected porch for Spring but wouldn't hold up out in the yard. That would require close adult supervision to use a waterproof glue.

The clay pot and saucer were less than $2.00 for both, the gnome was 40 cents, the birdhouse was $1.00. If you don't have moss around the house it is $1.00 for more than enough at dollar tree. I had the scraps of felt, yarn and fun foam. The rocks, pinecones and twigs were free. I had air dry clay but a small bag is a couple of dollars at Hobby Lobby and would be enough for a ton of mushrooms. You could use bread and a little white glue to make bread dough if you didn't want to buy Model Magic or create mushrooms from found objects. ( A champagne bottle cork looks just like a mushroom when painted but I didn't want to use those at work - for obvious reasons! )

The creative possibilities are endless and it's fun to make miniature little environments and play with them. When the children left with their finished Gnomes and Homes the adults were wishing they had come to the class!!

** Disclaimer continues... I'm still having "issues" when I try to post pictures and with spacing but at least I got something posted this try. I had more pictures to go with this post but they just wouldn't load. I'll keep trying but meanwhile please forgive the weird spacing on my posts!!