Crochet amigurumi gnomes - A free pattern and tutorial

Hello there my darlings!

I wanted to thank you so much for the warm comments you wrote on my Christmas card tutorial and for voting my design in the Amigurumi contest. Your support and love means the world to me! For those of you who asked to learn more about the Greek traditions this post holds another piece of that!

I bet most of you are familiar with gnomes! I am talking about those little cute underground living humanoids that have made it through the surface and have become a Christmas trademark. Yeah, that’s the ones!

Well, guess what? In Greece we have our very own gnomes. They are called Kallikanzari (I bet you can’t pronounce that!) and they are just as cute as their gnome cousins but much more misbehaving creatures.

What they do all year long is live underground with the sole purpose to saw down the world tree so that it will collapse and bring down the Earth with it. But when they are close to the end, Christmas dawns and they come to the surface! There they cause trouble, hiding things and pulling pranks to the poor humans.

I know many a housewives that have been driven mad because of the mischievous kallikantzari. They are saved from madness on the 6th of January when they return underground to find that the tree has healed in their absence and they need to start sawing it again.

Now, the folklore describes these kallikantzari as anything but cute but I am not known to follow the norms so my kallikantzari are more gnome like than goat-footed humanoids. In fact, just call them gnomes and forget I said anything about goats. Or humanoids.

Here is how to make them!

You will need:

A small amount of grey yarn to make pom poms

A small pom pom maker from the Flying TIger

A 3.00mm hook.
Cotton yarn for the hats in any color you like. I used fine cotton yarn in grey, magenta and brown from the Flying Tiger.