Fabric Covered Embroidery Hoop Tutorial

{Looking for the All Our Days’ Link-Up? Add your links here.}

I’ve admired fabric covered embroidery hoops as wall art for a long time. In fact, I’ve been meaning to make some of my own for almost 3 years!

Today, I finally bit the bullet and jumped in with both feet. And guess what…in less than 1 hour these pretties were on the kids’ bedroom wall.

What to see how we did it?

Here’s our quick and easy tutorial:

Gather Your Supplies

Embroidery hoops in a variety of sizes
Fabric pieces large enough to cover your hoops with at least 2″ to spare
Fabric Scissors
Glue Gun and glue sticks or Craft Glue
Small nails or pins for hanging

Our embroidery hoops were sent to us compliment of Wholeport craft supplies. You can also purchase these at arts and craft stores. Ours are bamboo, but the wooden ones would work too.

For a slightly different look you can paint these prior to adding the fabric. Just make sure they are good and dry before continuing.

We used fabric from a set of fat quarters I won online 4 years ago. I have a little problem getting rid of craft supplies (“You never know when I might need that.”

Planning

Determine which fabric you want for each hoop. To make this simple for our family, and since these were made for a room shared by all of our kids, I had the girl choose three fabrics and had Jonathan choose three fabrics. Since the fabric were all from the same fabric line, I already knew that they would coordinate nicely without being too matchy-matchy.

Prepare Your Fabric

Give your fabric a good pressing with steam to get all the wrinkles out (or at least as many as possible.)

Time to Get Started

Lay your ironed fabric out and arrange the hoop on top to get an idea of where you want the place the hoop.

Unscrew the connector at the top of the hoop and take the two hoop pieces apart.

Slide the inner hoop piece under the fabric.

Place the outer hoop over the fabric and inner hoop. Remember the hoop will hang from the screw connector, so make sure it’s at the very top and the fabric is lined up how you want it.

Tighten the screw top. If the fabric is puckered, simply pull on the outer fabric until you get a nice, wrinkle-free surface.

Turn the hoop and fabric over and trim the edge of the fabric. I left about 5/8 of an inch the whole way around. You need it to be long enough to glue down.

Once the whole circle is trimmed it should look like this.

I think it looks like a pretty fabric tart

Now it’s time to glue the edges down.

I used a low temperature glue gun and it worked perfectly. If you don’t have a glue gun, I’ve seen other people use craft glue (specifically Aleene’s Tacky Glue).

With the glue gun I made a 1/2 inch line of glue on the inside of the inner hoop and then pressed the fabric down against it. I didn’t make a continual line, but made a 1/2″ line, then skipped 1/2″, then glued 1/2″, etc. the whole way around the hoop.

This is what it will look like when you’re finished.

I’m sure it’s possible to glue the edges much neater than I did here, and maybe I would try if I was giving this as a gift, but for some quick and easy wall art for my kids’ room, this worked just fine.

When you finish them all, hang them with a small nail or pin. Just slide the screw closure over the nail and you’re good to go. I actually used small sewing pins and they worked great. The all metal ones are a little sturdier and didn’t bend when I hammered them into the wall like the ones with the plastic heads.

These fast and frugal fabric covered hoops are a great way to add some color to your walls. They would also make great gifts!

Have you ever made fabric covered embroidery hoops? Have you wanted to make some and just haven’t taken the time to do it? Tell me about which room you’d love to make some of these for.