Basting Boxes
Sometimes you can’t hoop the fabric directly, but taping or pinning doesn’t give enough stability to prevent your fabric shifting. Enter the basting box: a stitch that goes around the perimeter of the hoop to tack down the fabric to the stabilizer.
These pre-made basting boxes use a 3mm stitch, so they’re very easy to rip out if you’re embroidering on a larger piece - the lock stitches at either end will be the hardest bit, but from the stabilizer side it’s pretty straightforward. And just advance past them and stop before the ending ones if you think your fabric is likely to give you trouble with those.
Hoop Sizes
None of these basting boxes may look like they fit your machine, but that’s because they’re the more precise metric versions: my 5x7 machine, for instance, is really 5.11” wide and 7.08” long.
If you’re using Ink/Stitch (and you should be!), you can even put the hoops in as Inkscape page sizes. Open the pages.csv file (probably in your home directory as .config/inkscape/pages.csv) and add any hoops you want:
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#Inkscape page sizes
#NAME, WIDTH, HEIGHT, UNIT
4x4, 100, 100, mm
5x7, 130, 180, mm
8x8, 200, 200, mm
6x10, 150, 250, mm
6x10 max, 160, 260, mm
7x12, 180, 300, mm
8x12, 200, 300, mm
9x12, 230, 300, mm
9.5x14, 240, 360, mm
If you’re not, the chart above should still tell you what basting boxes work on your machine.
As with other free embroidery patterns here, the SVG file is included in the ZIP package so you can modify it in Inkscape and produce your own variations/sizes/etc.
