Make Your Hoops Prettier to Use as Frames

It’s popular to use embroidery hoops as frames for cross stitch projects, but a plain wooden hoop isn’t really that interesting as a way to present your hard work to the world.

Luckily it’s pretty easy to embellish an embroidery hoop to make it a little prettier to use as a frame.

Bobo Stitch has a couple of tutorials that will inspire you to make your hoops a little better.

First, you can paint your hoop to use it as a frame. I’ve done this before to make a wall storage pocket, which I guess I never blogged about, but you can find similar at East Coast Creative.

They say you should only do this for display purposes and not for a hoop that you plan to use for stitching because there’s a chance the paint could rub off on your project, which is probably a risk for finishbobostitch.co.uk/…/how-to-paint-an-embroidery-hooped projects, too, so you might not want to use this method on heirloom type projects or anything you might want to frame in a different size/shape of frame later on just in case.

You can also wrap your embroidery hoop in fabric, which is really cute and a fun way to reinforce the theme or colors of your project if you have fabric to match. This one only uses glue to attach the fabric to the hoop, but you might also want to use a bit of fabric Mod Podge on the fabric once it’s in place to keep it from fraying.

This one made me think maybe you could also decorate a hoop with washi tape, which would be more removable if you wanted to change the look.

Either way, if you want to make your embroidery hoop frames a little prettier, these are some great ideas. Have you ever used paint, fabric or something else to decorate a hoop? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: Bobo Stitch]

Next Pattern:

35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

A while back I made a little rainbow cross stitch pattern and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, so I turned it into a patch. My idea was that it could be used on a jacket or backpack, or you could add a pin to the back and wear it temporarily on a shirt or elsewhere.

But what if you want to make your design more permanent? Is it possible to turn a piece of cross stitch into an iron-on design?

It turns out yes, it is, and Sirious Stitches has done it so I didn’t have to try to figure it out on my own.

The way they did it was by using HeatnBond, an iron-on adhesive that attaches fabrics without sewing. There was still sewing involved to finish the edges of the cross stitch fabric and make it look like a purchased patch. The post shows how to do this by hand or with your sewing machine. (I just did blanket stitch edging on mine, which doesn’t look like a “real” patch but is also a lot faster.)

Once you have the patch prepared it’s a pretty easy matter of using the fusible adhesive to the back of the patch so you can then iron it onto whatever jacket, pair of jeans, bag or whatever else you might want to add it to.

I guess I’m a little paranoid about the washability of cross stitch projects, though you could hand wash anything with an iron-on cross stitch patch as you might need to with a purchased iron-on patch, anyway. But this does look really cool and is a great option if you know you want to permanently add a cross stitch patch to a garment of bag.

Get the full tutorial over at Sirious Stitches. Would you add an iron-on cross stitch patch to something? I’d love to hear what you would use this technique for!

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?