Stretching Fabric in a Hoop Frame

I'm going to quickly show you how to get fabric stretched tight in a hoop easily, without dropping things all over the place while we try to balance everything (we've all been there, right?) This method gets the fabric nice and straight right away, so that only minor adjustments may be needed. It's much easier than trying to get the large hoop over the small one!

Transcript:

 

I'm going to show you how I stretch my fabric in a hoop.

I start with my hoop quite close together so that if I were to shake it like this, it doesn't fall apart. So I want the hoops to be nice and snug, but still slightly movable. Like this.

What I want to do is take my hoop and separate the two parts. I like to make sure that if I were going to be viewing my hoop like this, I would have my screw on the right hand side. So when I take it apart, I'm going to do that upside down. I make sure my screw is on the opposite side. I put that down on my table.

I'm going to take my fabric and I want to put it upside down. So this is my cunning fox design and he actually sits this way round so I want to turn him over like this. Make sure that the design is in the middle and then take the smaller hoop and push it firmly down into the larger hoop. Takes a bit of effort. And there we are.

Now you can tweak between finger and thumb if there's anything that needs to be straightened out or pulled a little bit tighter.

If your hoop isn't quite tight enough in the first place, you can always adjust with the screw here, even if you need to use a screwdriver.

And there you have it. Nice tight fabric ready for stitching.