{Embroidery Hoop Snowman}

I am back from a very busy week to share a very fun Christmas craft with you.  It's my...

This little man is an early birthday gift for my mom.  I'm going to give it to her this afternoon, and I know she will love it!!!  To make it, I started with three embroidery hoops (5", 8", and 10"), white fabric, and embroidery floss.

I placed each hoop on the fabric and cut the fabric about two inches larger than the hoop.  I placed the fabric in the hoop as you would normally do, and then I glued the fabric around the back of the hoop to make sure it didn't slip.  I then cut the excess fabric off.

After I had the hoops ready for decorating, I used felt, thread, hot glue, and buttons to create the snowman's face.  I used a blanket stitch to attach the felt, and because the buttons were rather tiny, I hot glued them to the fabric rather than trying to do all that sewing.  (I get easily annoyed when sewing by hand!)  I sewed three larger buttons to the snowman's belly.  Because they were bigger, you would have been able to tell there was no thread in the holes if I had glued them.

Then it was time to make the little guy a hat.  I considered making him a toboggan, but any self-respecting snowman won't go out of his house without a top hat, so a top hat it had to be!  I cut the hat pieces out of recycled cardboard (a toilet paper tube and a snack box).  I used Mod Podge and hot glue to cover the pieces with felt.  Then I glued them together.

There were some places where the cardboard was peeking through the felt, so I just painted those places with black acrylic paint.  I added a red glittery felt band, two glittery leaves, and a red sparkly pom pom to finish off the hat.

I attached the hat to the snowman's head with hot glue.  I made the face so that the embroidery hoop hardware would be covered by the hat, so I had to cut a slit in the bottom of the hat so it would slide over the hardware.  I should have done that before gluing down the felt, but oh well.

I glued some branches to the back of the middle hoop to create arms.

I glued all the hoops together using hot glue and gorilla wood glue.  I made a felt scarf for the little man, and then he was presentable! ;)

Here he is on my front door.

Here he is hanging out on the porch.

Here's a close up of his cute as a button face.

I had taken another photo of him, and he looked really serious, as if he were dreaming of his lady love.  So I had to Picnik the photo up a bit to truly capture the emotion.

I'm not really sure why I wasted time I can never get back editing the above photo....  But I hope you don't feel like you wasted your time viewing this tutorial.  The project was fun to make and inexpensive, which hopefully encourages you to make your own embroidery hoop snowman! :)