The First Gnoel

Welcome to Day 5 of Blogmas At Home 2025! 🎄🎀✨

You can probably tell, but this year has been a really gnome-y one for me! I’m currently working on my December entry for the Year of Gnomes 2025, but it’s another MKAL (mystery knitalong), so I can’t share that one with you this year (I must protect the gnome secrets)! It wouldn’t be right to let the festive season pass by without a nod to my gnome-ing era, though, so I decided to make a different, Christmassy gnome outside of the year-long challenge.

Enter: Gnoel!

Gnoel is in charge of the Grimblewood Carol Singers: he picks the songs, assigns the parts and maps out the route every single year. His favourite carolling pick is The First Noel (for obvious reasons), but he is also partial to We Wish You A Merry Christmas, because, on occasion, the gnomes of Grimblewood have been known to take the lyrics literally and bring the troupe some actual figgy pudding (Gnoel‘s favourite treat!). Some of the members say he rules with an iron fist, but he would say that he rules with a firmly knitted mitten: there’s a difference.

Sarah Schira (a.k.a. Imagined Landscapes), released the pattern for this festive, colourwork gnome back in October (you can purchase it here) and I just loved all of the little details— I mean, just look at the hat bobbles, the fringe beard and the little mittens! Honestly, I think Gnoel might be my favourite gnome I’ve ever made. Scratch that: he is my favourite Gnome I’ve ever made!

Table of Contents

• Yarn Choices
• Thoughts on the Pattern/Gnome-Making Process
• Changes/Adaptations
• Final Thoughts

Yarn Choices

I think my favourite thing about Gnoel is the colours I used for him: I wanted something really festive, but something a little different to the more classic, red/green/white combo from the pattern. I spent a little while looking through other knitters’ projects on Ravelry (you can find my Ravelry profile here!) and saw lots of people using blues and purples, which I thought looked really nice, so I decided to take inspiration from that and make my own, blueish Gnoel.

Just as with my Year of Gnomes knits (or the majority of them, at least), I used scraps of fingering weight yarn for Gnoel. The pattern actually calls for DK weight yarn, but I just used fingering weight and sized my needles down accordingly (more on that later), because I wanted Gnoel to fit in nicely with my other gnomes, size-wise.

Gnoel requires 5 colours (I know, it’s a lot!), so I chose a navy blue; a mid blue; a deep, raspberry red; a slightly variegated gold and a cream. Coincidentally, all of the yarns (bar the gold, which I cannot place), are DROPS Fabel (a sock yarn that is particularly good for colourwork), which made them great choices for this particular project. The cream shade is Off White (100), the navy blue shade is Blue (107), the mid blue shade is Grey Blue (103) and the red shade is Ruby Red (113).

I absolutely LOVE how these five colours work together: it’s a really rich colour palette that, while not inherently Christmassy, still feels very festive and cosy. I did mess around with the arrangements of the colours in the various charts a little, just to get the best out of my specific choices, but it wasn’t anything too crazy!

Thoughts on the Pattern/Gnome-Making Process

I had the time of my LIFE making Gnoel. Actually, let me rephrase that: I had the time of my life making Gnoel’s hat and body (the arms, bobbles and beard… not so much). I was quite nervous going into this project because I knew it was going to be on the bigger side and that there was a lot of colourwork, but I honestly enjoyed the process SO MUCH. I think that’s partly to do with my colour choices (it was such a joy seeing the patterns work up in those beautiful shades!), but also, I just do love knitting colourwork— particularly when it stays nice and even and I don’t run into any problems. I was so glad I used DROPS Fabel for this— the colourwork sections using that yarn worked up so neatly and I definitely noticed a difference when I used the non-Fabel gold shade!

Worked in the fingering weight yarn, my Gnoel is about 24cm high. The shape of both his hat and body are relatively simple (albeit large): the wow factor really comes from the colourwork design and the small features: the fringed beard, the mittened arms and the bobbles on the hat! As much as I LOVE how all those little features look on the finished Gnoel… they were a bit of a pain to make. The beard includes a lot of cutting and re-joining the yarn, the mittens are exactly as fiddly as you might expect them to be and the bobbles… well the bobbles are straightforward, but having to make three of them (including the nose) feels like a bit of a chore. However! You cannot argue with results and boy, does Gnoel look cool. It’s worth a bit of faffing around to make him so absolutely adorable and wintery and warm: I love him.

Changes/Adaptations

I usually don’t make any changes to gnome patterns the first time I make them, but I did end up making a few alterations to Gnoel this time around:

• Fingering weight yarn (and needle sizes)

First of all, as I mentioned, I used fingering weight yarn instead of the DK weight yarn suggested in the pattern. Because of this, I used 2.25mm and 2.5mm needles instead of the 3.25mm and 3.5mm needles called for. As always, I made this gnome on circular needles using the magic loop method, not DPNs.

• Colour positions

I used 5 colours, as called for in the pattern, but I rearranged the positions of them in some of the colourwork charts, just to make sure they fit well together.

• Needle positions

In the body instructions, the pattern suggests not having a needle join at the centre-front, to ensure that the colourwork pattern looks super neat there. I would actually recommend applying this principle to the hat as well, because there is a larger tree motif at the centre-front of the hat that falls right where your needle join would be (particularly if, like me, you’re using the magic loop method). I rearranged my stitches so that my BOR marker was in the centre of one of my needles and the two needle joins were on the left and right-hand side of the hat, respectively, which made my Gnoel look much neater than he otherwise might have! I’m really glad I did this.

• Beard fringe length

I made the fringe on my beard 1.5cm long, which is a little shorter than the pattern calls for, because I think it looks better on my Gnoel this way. I did cut it to the original length to start with, but it just looked a little too long and straggly!

While we’re on the topic of the beard fringe: I found the best way to cut it was to stick a piece of washi tape along one edge of the beard, right on top of the fringing, then hold the whole thing up in the air and trim the fringe right up against the edge of the washi tape, with a small pair of scissors (and, then, of course, repeat that process for the other side). Handily, my washi tape was already 1.5cm wide, so it was a perfect marker, but it also keeps the fringing secure while you trim, so you can hold it up and get a super neat, even cut.

Final Thoughts

I said it earlier and I meant it: I think Gnoel is my favourite of all of the gnomes I have made this year (and I’ve made a lot…). I love the colours I chose, I love the colourwork design, I love his shape and size and general festiveness. I even love those fiddly little mittens, the fringe on his beard and the little bobbles on his hat. He just brings me so much joy to look at, and brought me even more joy to make: long story short, he’s my dream gnome. This was definitely one of my favourite knitting projects of the year!

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my festive gnome-ing (and my beloved Gnoel)!

If you're interested...

You can find the pattern for Gnoel on Ravelry here.

You can find my Ravelry project page for Gnoel here.

Gemma

xxx