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]
