Beautiful!! Crochet Art Framed in Embroidery Hoops

Yesterday I shared an exercise for framing your crochet to create art, as a practice in honoring your own creative self-expression. There are so many different ways to display your crochet, including many different types of frames that you can use. One unique idea that many people have started adopting recently is to use embroidery hoops to frame pieces of crochet and hang them as art. It’s a terrific display idea and one I just had to share more of!

Maillo does beautiful things with upcycled doilies, turning them into art in a variety of different ways. In this example we see all different color and stitches of work coming together in a collection because they are all “framed” in the same size and style of embroidery hoops.

But you can also make a beautiful wall art display with doilies of the same neutral color, as we see in this example from Little Lovelies.

This is one of my favorite examples. I originally spotted it whenLittle Treasures did a roundup of creative ways to use doilies including the one pictured here, which was originally a DIY from A Beautiful Mess.

Crochet mandalas are a great choice for something to display as art inside of an embroidery hoop. They are the right shape and size and are colorful, beautiful works of art. What you see here is a free mandala tutorial by Mama in a Stitch, designed to fit a 5″ embroidery hoop. Here is another example of a crochet mandala inside of a (plastic) hoop, this one from Attic24:

And this is one more example, from Design by Claire, who used a crochet pattern from Etsy to create a mandala-inspired design specifically intended to go inside of an 8″ embroidery hoop.

Corinne of Cozamundo shows a great option for displaying crochet that doesn’t fit neatly into the embroidery hoop. Place it on a fabric background. In  this case, she’s gone a step further, adding a crochet border to the hoop, too. It’s a lovely way to mix-and-match media, working a favorite fabric into your display.

Crochet artist Elin Thomas makes tiny organically-inspired pieces. In this example, she has worked the pieces onto a black background inside of a wooden embroidery hoop frame. This is another example, like Corinne’s, of how this display idea works by using fabric to fill the space when the crochet is smaller than the frame.

This pretty example is from BathCrochetRetreat. It shows how you can use the pairing of the right colors in crochet and fabric to really make a simple piece of artwork stand out. And also how you can create a vignette around the art that enhances the design.

And if you need more than an example, Grow Creative has a tutorial for crochet flower art inside of embroidery hoops.

Briony from @makethenest takes the mixed media idea even further. There is fabric inside of the hoop, along with printing and what looks like a button. A three dimension crochet flower is placed on top of the floral fabric. Crochet is again added to the frame. Beautiful! If you enjoy collage and mixed media, try playing with the hoop-as-frame.

Your art can also be functional, as in this example of a doily framed inside of an embroidery hoop and used as a jewelry hanger for earrings. This allows your crochet work to serve as wall art and also sets your jewelry on display as art forms of their own. One of my favorite little places in San Francisco is jewelry gallery Velvet da Vinci; visiting there has shown me that jewelry is definitely art whether it is being framed or worn! (This example was previously shared in an upcycled doily roundup, it is originally from These are a few of my Favorite Things, a Blogger blog that is no longer available.)

Here is another example of an embroidery hoop earring holder. This one has crochet around the outside of the hoop. the earrings are hung from trim or ribbon, which could also be your own homemade crochet edging. The Homemakery shares the DIY tutorial for this project.

Your embroidery hoop art can hold other things besides just jewelry, of course. You could even use them to organize your crochet hooks, putting them on display as art but still allowing yourself access to them when you want to use them. In this example, which is available as a tutorial from Stitch, Please, the hooks are stored in fabric inside the hoop but you could also make something similar using crochet fabric that you make yourself!

Find more great embroidery hoop display ideas from Cre8tive Designs and Buzzfeed.