Make Your Hoops Prettier to Use as Frames

January 17, 2025 by Sarah White

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]

Have you read?

Stitch a Color Wheel in Flowers

If you’re someone whose favorite color is all of them, or you know someone like that (in my world it’s my daughter!) this color wheel bouquet cross stitch pattern is one you might enjoy stitching.

It’s from Works by ABC and it features a rainbow of flowers stitches around the outside, with smaller flowers on the inside and a multicolored design in the middle that could be another flower but I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be.

The flowers are in 16 colors, and the full pattern uses 18 colors (with the addition of the green stems and the color of the petals and vines that go around the flowers).

The design is 133 by 133 stitches, which comes out to 9.5 inches square (or 24.13 cm) when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count over two threads. The pattern listing includes sizing for other counts if you want to make the project a little smaller. The sample was actually worked on 32 count linen, which is the same as 16 count Aida and comes out to 8.3 inches/21 cm.

Despite all the colors I feel like this wouldn’t be too difficult a project to stitch because the flowers are all the same so as long as your count is right on the first one you should be able to stitch them all the same. And it’s so much more fun than a regular color wheel for an art room or to stitch for an artist in your life.

You can grab the pattern from Works By ABC on Etsy.

Something about all the colors on this one (and that the designer also has temperature cross stitch patterns, I suppose) reminds me of temperature projects. This one has too many flowers to document a year, but if you’re looking for a temperature project I’ve collected a bunch of temperature cross stitch patterns, including one by this same designer that also uses flowers. So fun!

[Photo: Works By ABC]