The Story of the Month Cloaks

It was almost exactly 2 years ago that I finished my first Waldorf gnomes made for sale: a set of 12 month gnomes, which makes it kind of a milestone already. But this wasn’t my first months set, and the previous one had similarly significant role in tiny fairy history.

2 years before opening my shop with the first month gnomes I started making season gnomes with month cloaks for my children (and myself 🙂 ).

October, 2015: the making of the first month cloak set started. It didn’t occur to me to take a picture until the first cloaks were ready. I remember how much time I spent on finding the colors and how carefully I cut the coats. This was biiig work then.

I used a 10 (4 inch) cm base. The picture shows them somewhat taller than they really are, but this is indeed the biggest size I’ve ever made.

I had seen Waldorf season gnomes before, but the idea of replaceable month cloaks was mine, and I also had to figure out the decoration that goes with each month. There’s a Hungarian poem for children about months with catchy alliterations (actually, we greet the beginning of each month with their line from this poem), and I used some of the images from that, e.g. the grapes for September, falling leaves for October, fog for November etc. Even though I could use these ideas as starting points, I had to elaborate how January can “walk on ice” or how February can “blow frost” – in felt and embroidery. For some others the poem was not much of a help, and I had to work out the representation myself: for summer months I choose characteristic seasonal plants, for April changing weather, etc. I did a lot of research to find out which symbols are used more universally, but the final images had to be born in me. I wanted to create illustrations that are easy to differentiate and remember, as I wanted to use the set for educational purposes as well. I also needed images complex and beautiful enough to be interesting and nice to look at for a whole month every year.

The preparation took almost a year, partly because I spent a lot of time on working out the representations, and partly because I couldn’t immerse so deeply in completely different seasons than the one that I was actually experiencing.

Usually, the cloaks were ready only by the time we needed them in our calendar.

Although I felt that most of the work was done internally, during this year I made a big step forward technically too. October was the first one (the red one with the leaves) and if you go clockwise from that, you can probably see that while there is no big difference between the cloaks next to each other, when you go a full circle, October seems less delicate than the previous September (the dark orange one with the grapes), which was the last one I made. At least this is what I see 🙂

The huge amount of effort I put in this project lead to a beautiful and beloved calendar that we’ve been using ever since.

The next experiment was the milestone set I started my Tiny Fairy Words shop with. I wanted to make smaller gnomes but I found their cloaks were small to be made replaceable, so I made 12 separate gnomes, 3 for each months and all with different cloaks.

3 for each months

all with different cloaks

Finally I’ve found the perfect size and form

And this is the set I’ve been making ever since.

The latest improvement was that I replaced the colors of the season gnomes. They are somewhat softer, slightly darker and more different from the colors of the cloaks.

The latest set I’ve made. It’s still challenging enough to put me in a flow 🙂