The Weyburn Arts Council's 'Rolling with the Gnomies' intiative has been warmly received by adults and children all around Weyburn, ever since the gnomes began roaming town in February.

This is the second winter/spring season in which the gnomes have been created, placed, hidden, found, and then re-hidden, with all the tracking being done via the Facebook group  'Rolling with the Gnomies'.

Natasha Hill, Co-Chair of the Weyburn Arts Council, said they will likely keep the gnomes rolling until mid-spring. 

"We don't have a firm deadline for the gnomes. Generally right around the May long weekend is when we've kind of wrapped things up. We let it kind of fizzle out organically. All the gnomes, we hope as many gnomes as we can get back or return to the Spark Centre, and then they spend their summers at the Spark Centre and will be released in the winter of 2025."

"We are having a challenge with people holding on to the gnomes and then not releasing them, and then people get bored because there's none to find," she explained. "We are going to go back through the clues and try to find out where some may be that we haven't seen for a while." 

While, unfortunately, some of the gnomes seem to disappear with no trace, others lose the tips of their hats or noses. Thankfully, Hill noted, WAC has local potter (and City Curator) Regan Lanning to mend them when they're broken.

"We have a pretty qualified Gnome MD. Actually, it's the GD - Gnome Doctor. Regan is fabulous at reconstructing those gnomes back into healthy gnomes for more traveling."

Anyone who finds a broken gnome can take it to the Spark Centre for repairs, leaving it at the front desk.

Hill said the activity has become a favourite for locals, as it's free and fun.

"It's a no-cost activity, and the whole point of it for us was through that coming out of winter and into spring. It got people outside, and just raised everybody's spirits This last haul between winter and spring, it's really hard on a lot of people, and just having something to get you out, and get you excited even for five minutes, can really make a difference in somebody's day," she commented. 

Gnomes are being hidden in even more creative locations this year, with the group sometimes being left with tough clues to decipher.

"That's the beauty of these things developing organically, right? We don't have a lot of rules involved with the gnome project, just simply because we want to see where they're gonna go and we want to see who we're reaching."

"Sometimes there's just no rhyme or reason to it, and all of a sudden you have a rush of activity and it's just a bunch of new people that have never done it before and you're thinking, 'wow, awesome'. And as we go on through the years, as long as we renew the project, of course, because there is a cost associated with it, we're going to be reevaluating and see what happens."