Stitch Swap Embroidery Hoop

At the beginning of the month I told you how I signed up to participate in Wild Olive's stitch swap and even though I've posted my finished piece on flickr, I thought I'd share it here as well! My partner said she liked geek crafts - so as a perfect match with geeky old me, I made her some love robots (robots are geeky right?):


I went with the traditional kate stitch style and used wool felt to give the robot bodies some colour. I love how the hearts seem to pop off of them and I stitched a little heart at the top to tie it all together. Here's a close up:


Aww - I sure hope she likes it! I've never done embroidery hoops before but I am totally and completely in love. I've done tons of stitching projects in the past and always make things out of them so it is pretty refreshing to just stitch one and leave it as that. I think I need to make a whole bunch of these to sell on etsy and at craft shows - just look at it in its 4" glory:


The only thing I was a little uncertain about was how to make it "ready to hang". I looked at some hoops I've bought in the past from and they simply glued the edges to the hoop to finish it off. After doing so, Wild Olive did a post on how to finish hoops (oops) with much better instructions, but alas - I think this does the job:


I kind of like how you get to see the inner workings of the piece too (maybe I just like that stuff). If you're interested in seeing what some of the other super talented stitchers did you should check out the flickr group Wild Olive has set up. Oh man are there some amazing embroidery hoops on there! I hope mine is good enough! So what do you think? Anyone else join in the swap?