chloe's embroidery hoop wall art - a little delightful

Last week I showed you Noah’s birth stats wall art and if you’re a liker on facebook a while back you would have seen me sharing some photos etc of me working on embroidery hoop art for my little Chloe.

Well I’m happy to say that it has been up in her room for a little while now and I really really love it. I don’t 100% love the placement but it wasn’t easy getting small nails into the wall {they go through the plaster and then when they hit the brick they bend or end up chipping plaster + paint – hubby and I didn’t want to drill a hole for each hoop}.

I wanted something that could bring a little more teal colour into Chloe’s super pale pink room now that she is a little older. Just a hint though, not too much. I bought this little bird house on the shelf from Bed Bath and Table for 50% off after Easter, making it $7.50. It was white with green polka dots though – so I chose a lovely colour at bunnings and then painted it to bring a little pop of colour into her room.

I chose some fabrics that also went with the colour scheme to create the embroidery hoop art. The large LOVE hoop is a copy of one I saw at Typo for $24.

I threw in a couple of plain hoops to keep the balance with the busier hoops. The little teal polka dot hoop has an embellishment that is off one of Chloe’s old shirts that she had grown out of.
I wanted to fill this wall space above her cot because we have had to take the canopy down as she is a monkey and kept pulling at it and playing with it. :o} I expected as much though, and am sure when she is a little older she can have it back up in her room, but 17 months = cheeky cheeky so no canopy for now.

On this hoop I used iron on transfer paper to place a special poem from my childhood onto some pink polka dot fabric. I have no idea where this poem came from, but my Mum embroidered it onto a little pillow that hung from my bed and I have always wanted to put it in a little girls room should I have one. It is a sweet poem that means so much to me, it made me smile when I read it as a child and I hope it makes my girl smile too.

Unfortunately since moving out of home I can’t find the beautiful little pillow my Mum embroidered and so I made this for my Chloe instead. I am not good at embroidery so iron on transfer was easier for me. Maybe one day I’ll embroider it. You can also apparently print onto fabric but I haven’t tried that out yet! I used a hot glue gun to glue on a few buttons – a couple of them are from one of Chloe’s baby outfits.

To keep the button theme going from the poem I made a C hoop using buttons and a hot glue gun is a must for something like this {I bought mine a while ago from Spotlight for about $8}, but your fingers will get hot glue on them! I used old curtain fabric for the back of this one as it was a little thicker to withstand more glue than the thin cotton fabric I used for some of the other hoops although they would have probably been just fine.

If you are going to use iron on transfers to make any kind of art like this I will suggest you try and do it in once piece like this:

Because if you do it in strips for each line like I originally did, you might get one upside down and have to start all over again! Ooops! Also iron on transfers will more than likely leave a kind of shine from the transfer. The only way to avoid this is to cut around the letters to leave out as much of the unprinted transfer paper as possible. I was so not going to do this {too hard!!} and you do see a slight shine to the hoops where I used the iron on transfers but it isn’t too noticeable to really bug me right now.

I also suggest that you glue your fabric to the hoops. Yep, it means the hoops probably can’t be changed or used for something else without getting damaged when you try to take the fabric off but if you don’t do this all your hard work can go to waste because it makes it very easy for the fabric to move out of place or even come loose. I trimmed the fabric and then used the hot glue gun to secure it all the way around the hoop.

I bought all my embroidery hoops from Spotlight and they ranged between $2-$4 each.
I also made Chloe’s birth stats embroidery hoop. I am in love with how this turned out {the one with the button flowers}. Pretty much exactly what I was dreaming and hoping I’d end up with at the end of the project. I did embroider the stalks ever so carefully and nervously! I used iron on transfer again for this one.