Rose Hoop Art

Project Description

For month 12 of the Echidna PIE Embroidery Training series, the folks over at Echidna requested a “hoop art” project. I had to do a little research to find out exactly what hoop art was before designing this project for the final lesson in the series, which is on thread.

The rose is the birth month flower for both Australia and the U.S. and is one of the most enduring symbols of love and appreciation.

Although I had some fabric selected for the applique, I decided it interfered too much with the Softlight Metallic thread I had chosen. My background fabric is a pink silk dupioni.

Just because a design has appliques doesn’t mean you have to include them. However, you do need to know how to inspect your design in software to make sure those fabrics aren’t covering up some areas of stitching that aren’t intended to be visible.

The message shown uses Apple Chancery but instead of just typing it in, I digitized each letter. Although we read and type from left to right, that creates a really long jump from one the end of one line to the beginning next when stitching that way.

It doesn’t matter what order we stitch so instead of the middle line of the text stitches from right to left. Whenever you can minimize hoop movement during embroidery, you should!

Whenever possible, I stitch labels for my projects. I hand blanket-stitched a felt backing to the reverse side of my hoop art and it made the perfect area to add a message about the project. (Embroider the label before you add the backing!)

If you’re one of those people who think handwork is a dirty four-letter word, then just fire up the glue gun and hot glue it in place.

I nearly always use Adine Script for labels. Adine Script is a running stitch font and although taller than the smallest satin stitch fonts, it’s thinner and less bulky. Besides, it’s pretty!

Although month 12 is technically the end of this series, I provided a bonus lesson the following month which included the instructions for making both quilts. During the year, many designs were included but not all of them were the applique blocks for the quilt and those are all available separately.

Learn more about the training series: Looking for High-Quality Low-Cost Embroidery Education? (Note that the entire series is now bundled into one downloadable product.)