A Gnome A Day- Day 35

The momentum is waning so I find myself tired by the idea of making a gnome but as soon as I pull out the wool, I find myself lost in the colors and the personality that soon emerges from the magic of wool. This fellow is in blue- mostly because I realized that I haven't used blue in a while and I wanted to keep things more full spectrum than that. He also sports a grey beard and brown skin. He is a particularly wise gnome, this one.

In previous years, when I made dolls or gnomes, the ones with brown skin didn't sell as quickly which I found very sad- not because of the money part but because I thought that gnomes should sell no matter what their skin tone was. I grew up as one of the only light-skinned children in my neighborhood- something my parents did with great consideration and forethought so that I would understand the concept of being a minority and the importance of diversity in this amazing world we live in. They told me their experiences with racism growing up in the South and how hard it was to hear the slurs people spoke around them and to their friends and how the color of someone's skin shouldn't ever carry the amount of weight that so many people put on it.

I carry that with me and though so many gnomes I have made are fair-skinned, I often dream of dark-skinned gnomes- with close cropped beards or long dreadlocks or the cornrows I was so jealous of as a child-- this would be hard to do with the size gnome I usually create but one can always dream....

Hee hee- let the world celebrate gnomes of diversity!! Hee Hee Hee!