Once again about hooping

Original text by: Marina Belova  

There seem to be so many hooping rules, and I've read them many times, but yet, a new idea sometimes springs to my mind. What's more, I get new ideas about simple things, which I've seen more than once, and simple principles I've more or less successfully tried to put into practice. 

So, the January issue of the Impressions magazine contained a wonderful article on 10 basic rules of hooping by Deborah Jones, titled "Hooping": The Foundation of Embroidery". The first thing that caught my attention were the photos of a hoop for commercial machine embroidery designs with a very interesting-looking outer ring. What was so interesting about it was that it lacked the familiar screw. Instead it had an unknown device, a wonderful know-how, which, as this woman, respected by a lot of people (including me), wrote, was a part of so-called "new self-tensioning hoop": 

The photo was taken from the Impressions magazine, January 2014 

This means that from now on you won't have to adjust the hoop screw by yourself; it is now done automatically. I haven't found any description of this remarkable product or its working principle neither in the article (maybe I haven't been attentive enough) or on the internet. Pity, for it would be rather curious to know. 

Second, and maybe even more important, I was amazed by this photo: 

The photo was taken from the Impressions magazine, January 2014

Why amazed? Because a year ago I expatiated upon about wrapping of the hoop in order to make the contact between the hoop and the fabric better. 

Everything written there is true except one little detail: with round hoops for the commercial embroidery, you should wrap the inner ring and not the outer one like I demonstrated. To bind (or wrap in fabric) the outer ring of the round hoop would be a waste of time and material. I distinctly remember why I decided to wrap the outer ring instead of the inner one — because it was more easy to do so using a long narrow strip. 

So far I've wrapped only one hoop using this method: 

I hope now that it will help me to solve the problem with embroidery on slippery fabrics that tend to escape from the hoop (thin sharkskin, laminated fabrics), because the contact between them and the hoop will be better. But I won't guess at the future and try embroidering on these fabrics instead. 

P.S. What is the most interesting, a lot of people have read my previous blog describing the wrong way of wrapping the hoop, and nobody corrected me on that.