The Lawndale Gnome King’s village first started growing in March 2020, after one lonely gnome in Lawndale, California, received a very sweet letter from an equally lonely neighborhood kiddo.

What happened next kind of took on a life of its own. More letters started showing up, more kids joined in, the village kept growing, and over the next year I painted more than 1,000 Kindness Rocks Gnomies that ended up traveling far beyond our little corner of Lawndale. What started as one tiny way to make quarantine feel a little less lonely became this really special community project built around kindness, curiosity, and giving people something unexpected to find in their everyday lives.

A few years later, that same idea of community took on a much bigger meaning when our neighborhood found itself fighting a Metro rail proposal that would have brought hundreds of additional trains alongside Lawndale homes. Neighbors organized, spoke up, showed up, and refused to accept that the plan was already decided for us. In the end, Metro changed the route and moved it away from the neighborhood and toward the commercial corridor instead.

That whole experience stuck with me because, in a weird way, it felt connected to everything the Gnome King had always been about. Small things can become big things. One person leaving a note can start an entire village; one neighbor speaking up can encourage another one to do the same, and sometimes the tiniest voices really can change the tracks.

That is where Small Wonders Society comes in.

Small Wonders Society is the next chapter of the Lawndale Gnome King, and it gives me room to take everything I loved about the original project and make the world a little bigger. There will still be gnomes, of course, but also tiny doors, hidden portals, painted rocks, neighborhood installations, clues, little pieces of art, things to collect, things to leave behind, and other odd little surprises tucked into ordinary places.

The whole idea is pretty simple: there are wonders everywhere, and sometimes we just need a reason to look a little closer.

I want Small Wonders Society to feel like you have stumbled onto something you weren’t necessarily supposed to find, followed it a little further, and suddenly realized there might be an entire world hiding inside the ordinary one.

Follow along on Instagram to see what we are making, where new wonders are appearing, and what the Society gets up to next.

If you found a Kindness Rocks Gnomie out in the wild, be sure to tag the #LawndaleGnomeKing and #SmallWondersSociety and post them to social media. We always love seeing where the gnomies end up.

(Please make sure your post is set to ‘public’ otherwise we won’t be able to see your gnome find!)