Hooping a project correctly for your embroidery machine is a big part of the end result. Essentially, you want your product to sit flat in the hoop, and to stay flat while your embroidery machine sews. If you stretch your fabric too tightly while hooping, the hoop will hold the fabric that way while sewing, but once the hoop is removed, the weave will want to return to its natural state and if there is an embroidery design in the way, the fabric will just pucker around the design. This is often mistaken as a tension problem and in theory, this is kind of true – the tension of the fabric was too high. When trying to embroider on a more difficult item, it can be tempting to just clip it over the hoop, but nine time out of ten, this will be loose while you are sewing, causing the fabric to pucker, stitches to knot instead of loop, and results to be poor. Very commonly, a loosely hooped item will let itself be dragged up and down with the thread as a stitch is formed, and this can cause your thread to break. For best results, especially while you are still learning, you should hoop INTO your hoop as much as you can, and always use embroidery stabilisers with your embroidery machine.