Jessica Peill-Meininghaus was forever making plans, making promises to herself and then letting them drop. Morning runs, household chores, and studying marine biology all ended within a week.

So when Peill-Meininghaus started needle felting gnomes — tiny, colorful creations with pointy hats and bulbous noses — she hoped they might teach her how to stick with something.

She vowed she’d make a gnome each day. For a year.

“It was like a week into the (2012) New Year and it popped into my head,” she said. “And I really, truly thought, ‘Yeah, right’ in the back of my head the whole time. I was like, ‘Yeah, right, like you’re going to make a gnome every day for a year. Come on, weird woman.'”

But the gnomes proved magical.

Not only did Peill-Meininghaus stick with her plan, she followed through on something else: writing a book about that year.

“The Gnome Project: One Woman’s Wild and Woolly Adventure” is out this month, a 180-page chronicle of gnomes, family and a life-changing coast-to-coast move to rural Maine.

“Of all the years for me to decide that I’m going to do something completely crazy, like make a gnome every day, it’s going to be the one year that I change everything,” she said. “All of a sudden, these drastic changes happen in this kind of magical and alarming way.”

Peill-Meininghaus was living in Portland, Ore., with her husband and four kids, when she launched her gnome experiment. An artist since childhood, she’d wet-felted her first piece when she was 16, using soap and water to shape a bit of wool into a recognizable shape. She was in her 20s when she started needle felting, using barbed needles to sculpt wool pieces into creations with more detail than she could get with wet felting. 

It was almost instinctive to needle felt gnomes. She’d always had an affinity for the earthy mythical creatures. 

“I loved fairies and gnomes and elves, that mystical fantasy realm,” she said. “I grew kind of particularly fond of gnomes as I got older because, you know, they could be grumpy, they could be pensive, they could be silly. And I just kind of felt like, yeah, I’m probably kind of like a gnome myself.”

To create a 4- to 5-inch gnome, Peill-Meininghaus shaped a head first, then the body. She attached the head, dressed the body, attached the gnome’s signature hat and beard. At the end: eyes.

“I can’t poke a needle into something that has eyes. If it’s looking at me and I feel like I’m stabbing it, I can’t do it,” she said. “So the eyes go in last.”

She started off strong that January. Made a gnome, took his photo posed in the grass, posted it to her blog. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Until day 11, when she forgot. And days 106 and 107 when she was sick. And day 205 when she was driving cross-country with her family and couldn’t bring herself to create a gnome at the end of the day.

But Peill-Meininghaus didn’t quit.

“It’s kind of a mystery to me,” she said. “It’s just somehow, some way, they embedded.”

Despite scattered missed days, Peill-Meininghaus plowed on making boy gnomes, girl gnomes, baby gnomes. A gnome in pink and blue leggings and a lime shirt. A gnome she dubbed Yellowpants Maggenty. A ninja gnome and a mer-gnome — part mermaid, part gnome.

At first, Peill-Meininghaus considered keeping them all.

“Then I thought ‘You’re insane. Where are you going to put them all? You’re going to have boxes of gnomes everywhere. It’s going to be disaster,'” she said. “I thought, ‘You’re going to have to let this go.'”

She began selling the gnomes with her other artwork online and at craft fairs. Between the sales and her blog, she built a following.

“People are entertained by it. They definitely think it’s odd. Because it is odd. I’m under no illusions. It is an odd thing to do,” Peill-Meininghaus said. “I say, ‘well, it’s kind of a funny thing, but this is what I do.’ It’s actually healing in some ways to make this one little thing. It happens to be gnomes.”

At the same time, her family was considering a move to the country. They’d lived on a small farm when the children were little but had been in the city for years. They missed rural life.

Peill-Meininghaus and her husband began looking for a new home. They found it in the small Waldo County town of Burnham.

Through months of house-buying stress and long-distance moving, gnomes became a constant.

“Inside I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the panic or laziness or distraction to reach the point that I would skip it ‘just for today,'” Peill-Meininghaus wrote in her book.

But the other shoe didn’t drop. And that follow-through rhythm followed into other parts of her life, from regular water aerobics classes to set-in-stone house rules. 

“I had grown as a person before my very eyes, and I was proud of myself,” she wrote in the book. “And all of this was done with wool, a pipe cleaner, a felting needle and my own two hands.”

By the end of the year, Peill-Meininghaus had made over 366 gnomes. She also had a blog, photos and a plan to make the memories of that momentous year into a book for her children.

Curious about a wider reception, Peill-Meininghaus queried literary agents about her book idea. It didn’t take long before one agreed to take her on. The Countryman Press in Vermont became her publisher.

Although the book is set to be released this month, some readers have received early copies. They’ve given it praise.

“A couple of people have read the book and written to me, people that I don’t know. It actually has made me cry every time because it’s hard to make something and then put it out into the world and then wait to see what people think,” Peill-Meininghaus said. “It’s like putting a little piece of you into the world.” 

The year after her experiment, Peill-Meininghaus decided to stop making a gnome a day. She wanted to see what would happen

She didn’t like the result.

“I didn’t feel as settled in 2013. I kind of felt like I was a little drifting. I had a hard time trying to stick to things,” she said. “Something didn’t feel right.”

So in 2014 and 2015 Peill-Meininghaus resumed her gnome-a-day schedule. She sells them online, where prices range from $6 for a baby “gnomeling” to $32 for a mother and baby pair. Most cost $16.50. 

She also posts each creation on her blog, complete with a personality description and back story.

“Her back is beginning to get a bit sore, and the baby tends to get hiccups and keep her up at night, but oh how she loves this time of life!” Peill-Meininghaus wrote about the pregnant gnome she created on April 12. 

Peill-Meininghaus kept few of the gnomes she made that first year. Since then, she’s started keeping her favorites. Three of them — a tiny African-American gnome with a copper wire core, a gnome with teal skin and a rainbow beard that she created on her birthday and a gray-haired elderly lady gnome — live in an eyeglass case in her purse. 

“It’s a little reminder that I was able to do something,” she said. “I was able to practice something and create something different in my life.”

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send photos, ideas and mythical creatures to [email protected].