tutorial: embroidery hoop

Hi everyone, I hope you all are having a lovely Sunday! Today I'll be teaching you all how to create this adorable hoop that I designed myself. There's a link to the design template for you to download and try the hoop out on your own!

Start by gathering your materials. You will need:

- A 5” embroidery hoop

- Various colors of embroidery floss

- Fabric (I picked up this pale grey linen from Joann's - anything that doesn't have stretch to it works!)

- Scissors

- Needle (I like size 3 embroidery needles)

- Frixion Erasable Pen

- Printed design template

- Felt (not pictured - cut a circle a tiny bit larger than the outer circumfrence of the inner hoop)

- Some sort of heat source. An iron, stove top, straightener, or candle works great!

This design is somewhat complicated, but I wanted to introduce you all to a few of the different types of common stitches. I left out some like chain, brick, and stem stitch but keep an eye out for other tutorials where I’ll teach them. Below is what you'll see in the design template. I've included a version that's colored by stitch!

Black is back stitch, red is the lazy daisy stitch, blue is satin stitch, pink is for french knots, and green is the woven wheel stitch.

With the pen, draw the design onto the fabric. An easy way to transfer the design is to tape the template to a brightly lit window and tape the fabric over it. Then trace the design carefully onto the fabric. This Frixion pen is heat-erasable which makes it ideal for transferring embroidery designs. If you mess up, just run it over with an iron and the pen should disappear!

After transferring the design, open your hoop and center the fabric on top of the inner hoop. Place the outer hoop around the fabric and inner hoop and twist the tightening screw as much as you can. While you are doing this, pull the fabric so that it is extremely tight across the hoop. Having your fabric drum-tight makes everything easier when you stitch. When you tap the fabric there shouldn't be any give.

First off, we’ll start with the lettering. I like doing words in chain stitch but with a smaller hoop like this one, back stitch works great. You just have to be very careful with your stitches and make sure you make each stitch the same width to keep things neat and uniform. With lettering in a hoop this small, we are going to split the floss up into smaller strands. Embroidery floss has six strands, but we will only use three. Cut a good length of black floss and separate it into two different strands of three each.

The most important thing is to keep your stitches uniform in length!

Steps for Backstitch:

1. Enter the fabric a few centimeters away from the previous stitch.

2. Go back through the previous stitch’s hole. Get as accurate as possible, because if you miss the words don’t look as smooth.

3. Enter again from the back a few centimeters away from the stitch you just made.

Continue with that for the rest of the lettering. This is what it should look like when you're done! You can keep the dot off the 'i' in rain for now - we'll be coming back to that later.

Next we'll be working on the rain drops. This stitch is called satin stitch. Satin stitch is used to fill areas in with color quickly. The trick to satin stitch is to make sure that your stitches aren't too long (so they don't lose tension) and keeping them close together for the smooth look.

Steps for Satin Stitch:

1. Enter the fabric from the back at the edge of the outline. Get as close to the last stitch as possible.

2. Go through the fabric at the other side of the stitches.

3. Repeat until the entire section is covered and no fabric is visible.

After completing all of the raindrops, we'll move on to the "lazy daisies'. This stitch is so easy and you can make a lot of flowers fast. Don't be frightened by the amount of steps - once you get the hang of this stitch, you'll be cranking out daisies in no time.

I used the lazy daisy stitch for this but then filled the petals in with satin stitch. That's totally up to you if you want to!

Steps for Lazy Daisies:

1. Enter the fabric from the back in the center of the flower.

2. Go back through the center of the flower. I recommend not going through the exact same hole. Make sure you don’t pull the stitch all the way through - there should be a good-sized loop still there.

3. Enter the fabric from the back at the tip of one of the flower petals making sure to go through the loop you created in the previous step. Pull the stitch gently so that the petal you just formed lines up with the petal outline.

4. Exit through the fabric a little farther than the place you entered at the tip of the petal. This stitch just keeps the petal in place. Pull taut so that it forms a petal.

5. Repeat for all petals.

Next up is the woven wheel stitch. This one makes roses - it looks complicated but is probably the easiest out of all of these stitches. There's minimal stitching actually involved and it makes the prettiest flowers.

Steps for Woven Wheel Stitch:

1. Draw five lines as equidistant apart as you can - this isn't super important, but making the lines the same width is!

2. Stitch those five lines, making sure they originate from the same center point.

3. Enter the fabric from the back close to the center point but not exactly in it.

4. Skip one line and slide your needle underneath the next.

5. Skip another line and slide your needle underneath the next.

6. Skip another line and slide your needle underneath the next. As you can tell, all you're doing is skipping and going under each of the lines. You need to have an odd number of lines for this to work!

7. Continue around the wheel. Don't pull the 'stitches' too tightly or leave them too loose. They should rest on each other but all of them should still be visible.

8. Once complete, exit the fabric somewhere near the edge of the rose, angling your needle inwards.

9. This is what the back looks like if you are interested!

Finally, the last stitch I'm teaching you today is the French knot. This stitch took me awhile to master, I'll be honest, but the key to this stitch is keeping the tension while you pull your needle through. In this design, you'll use French knots in the tulip, daisy, the dot of the 'i', and I put them sporadically around the hoop for color.

Steps for a French Knot:

1. Enter the fabric at the place you want the dot. Wrap the floss around the needle. Place the needle in front of the floss, then wrap the floss under then over. The floss should be wrapped once for this project. (If you wrap multiple times, the knot will get bigger)

2. With your left hand, hold the left string so that it's wrapped very tightly around the needle. With your right hand, insert the needle into the fabric as close as you can to the point you entered the fabric, but NOT the same hole.

3. Pull the needle through the fabric making sure you keep your left hand pulling the string tight around the needle. The wrapped section of thread should be as close to the fabric as possible. Tension is everything with these knots! Once the needle is through you can let go of the string from your left hand and pull the string all the way through the fabric. You should be left with a neat little knot!

Once you complete the entire hoop, you're ready to finish it! There are many many ways to back a hoop, but this one was the first one I learned and it just stuck with me. Honestly, there are a lot of ways that are easier than this one, so just Google it and pick which one you like the best! Before you finish it, make sure your fabric is centered and pulled as tight as you can in the hoop.

How to Finish a Hoop

1. Cut your fabric leaving about an inch around the hoop. Thread your needle through the fabric from the back as close to the hoop as possible.

2. Thread the needle through the felt a few centimeters from the edge. Then thread the needle back through the fabric and felt. Make sure you are catching the fabric in your stitches!

3. Continue around the edge of the hoop. Try to make your stitches as even as possible!

4. This is what the finished hoop should look like.

You're done with the hoop! Hopefully it looks something like this, but if not, I'm sure it's beautiful. This design was meant for you to just practice some different stitches out and now you can take what you've learned and create something else!

HERE is a link to to the page where all of our downloadable content will be! Just click the download icon to get the template for this embroidery hoop.

I hope y'all enjoyed this tutorial! If you have any questions or suggestions on what you want to see in the next tutorial, leave a comment below! We're also doing a giveaway on our Instagram for this very hoop when we reach 100 followers, so make sure to check us out @mollyandgabriella.

See y'all soon,

Gabriella