Earring embroidery ring tutorial

I honestly don't have a ton of earrings here in Korea, but recently I purchased a few pairs and they have been very unhappily clumped in a teeny weeny zipper bag. They don't like me very much for this - so I have decided to give them a place where they can dangle freely.

My mom has been hanging her earrings on an embroidery ring  since I can remember. And I've seen quite a few people do some really pretty applique work on embroidery rings. So I decided that I should combine pretty and functional. 

This is just a basic tutorial to show you what I did - I hope that this will inspire you to draw your own design and make something amazing. If you would prefer to use my drawing then you can get the template here :)

What you will need: 

A base piece of fabric - the size depends on the size of your embroidery ring.

(my ring is only 15.5cm in diameter because I don't have many earrings)

A template/ drawing of a design 

fabric scraps (cotton/felt)

embroidery thread

iron-on adhesive

Before you start make sure that your picture is smaller than your embroidery ring (seems like a silly instruction but its a mistake that you don't want to make :)

Iron the fabric on to the iron-on adhesive, trace/copy your pieces and cut them out. 

 My picture only shows the leaves because I didn't do this with the tree base (I used felt and not cotton so I just embroidered my felt directly on to the fabric with out iron-on adhesive) 

I first embroidered the trunk of the tree to the fabric. I used back stitching.

 Then I drew the extra branches with my fabric marker and embroidered the lines (back stitching.)

I then placed the leaves where I wanted them and ironed them on to the fabric. The iron-on adhesive is very necessary for this step because the leaves move around so easily and the adhesive stops the fabric from fraying.

 Then embroider around each leaf ( I used a thinner thread for this because I liked the way it looked) to give it some detail. 

If I can take a minute and be honest... I don't own any embroidery thread - its a bit difficult for me to get hold of. SO I do the unthinkable and fold my normal sewing thread in 5 or 6 and hand sew with that. It does make it more difficult, but if you don't have embroidery thread it works perfectly fine.

 Now you can just cut the edges of the fabric (give it 2-3cm allowance - but not too much otherwise it will cause bundling in the front) and tuck it into the back of the embroidery ring. Make sure you pull the fabric tight. I used the back of the needle to tuck the fabric. If it slips out, which happens easily, you can use small drops of craft glue on the inside of the embroidery ring before you tuck the fabric. If this seems like too much effort you can trim the edges of the fabric so that they aren't visible from the front. If you know of any other way to finish the edges - please let me know :)

Have fun.

If you have any questions feel free to ask - I will gladly help where I can 


^-^