Make Your Hoops Prettier to Use as Frames

January 17, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

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]

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Designer Spotlight: Pigeon Coop Designs

Pigeon Coop Designs is a Canada-based Etsy shop that bills itself as having nature inspired cross stitch patterns and kits. I get a little of a folk art, retro feel from their designs, which emphasize natural landscapes and animals.

In fact, I just shared one of their patterns the other day in the fox cross stitch collection, not realizing I also had them on the schedule to feature.

Because they are based in Canada, a lot of the landscapes and landmarks featured are found in that country. Though of course you could stitch up a raccoon in a trash bin with any city’s name on the side, and the four seasons of Quebec could be any place with mountains, trees and a river if you don’t happen to have a connection to Canada.

You’ll also find more general nature designs like shells and ocean animals, lots of birds, some desert creatures and landscapes, trees and mountains and more.

One design that caught my eye was this flower farm design, which reminds me a little of quilting, I guess because of the bands of flowers. It uses 11 colors and the design is 100 by 91 stitches. As charted the project is square, but you can put it in a 7 inch round hoop and it just covers a bit at the edges.

While the emphasis here is on nature and landscape designs, there are a few urban designs (as mentioned above) and a handful of patterns marked as holiday. As of this writing they are all Christmas/winter themed, and there are birds and other animals here as well as cozy looking log cabins, a quilt block inspired design and more.

Check out Pigeon Coop Designs on Etsy if these look like projects you would like to do. I’d love to hear if you make something of theirs!

[Photo: Pigeon Coop Designs]

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