It’s been a while since I’ve done any kind of in-depth needlework product review. This particular tool has been on my radar for a while.

When a friend inquired about it recently, wondering if I had tried it and what I thought, I figured I’d take the plunge and purchase it. That way, you can know if it’s something you’re interested, and you can be aware of pros and cons before you purchase it.

The tool in question is the hoop floor stand by Nurge, a company that I think is located in Turkey, that’s recently made some inroads in the wider needlework market, especially in Australia and a little bit in the UK. Nurge products aren’t widely available in the US, but they are showing up here and there, now and then.

I’ve tried their hoops – I bought a set of them many months ago and I’m not quite sold on them compared to those I already use – but today, we’re going to take a look at their floor stand, which can hold most types of embroidery hoops.

The review goes into great detail, so if you have questions, read through the review thoroughly first and then feel free to ask anything you want to know in the comment section.

Right off the bat, be aware that this is a floor stand, primarily, but it can be used as a table top stand if you adjust all the sections in a way that makes the hoop accessible on a table top.

Still, I think that, given the construction of the stand and certain difficulties it poses, I wouldn’t want to make extreme adjustments on this stand frequently. For the price, which hovers under $70 in the US, I’d just leave it as a floor stand.

The whole point of a stand like this is to hold your hoop securely, without wiggling and jiggling and tilting about, so that both of your hands are free to embroider. And the stand does that, just as it’s supposed to do.

Your second hand might be underneath the embroidery, receiving the needle and sending it back up the surface (two-handed embroidery), or it might be managing a laying tool to help you create perfectly smooth or perfectly places stitches.

Or you might want a stand just to save yourself from having to hold a hoop! Some people like stands that hold their hoops and frames simply because they allow you to embroider more comfortably. Especially if you have any kind of hand issues – arthritis, swelling, anything like that – a stand will save your hands from stress and extra pain.

The Nurge stand is constructed with a broad, heavy-enough base with this little hump in it, onto which the spine of the stand is attached using these plastic wing-nut things to allow for adjustments.

You can see by looking closely that the finishing details aren’t great, but overall, the stand is finished ok. The wood is sanded smooth enough, and I didn’t encounter any splintering or anything like that.

The spine is made up of five of these interlocking sections that can be adjusted using the plastic wing nut.

I do like the fact that this stand can be adjusted in a multitude of ways as a floor stand, with little nuances of change, to make it more comfortable to use. Compared to the straight, vertical, up-and-down floor stands that hold hoops, this adjustability seems to be an advantage.

A note on the adjusting: I find I have to tighten different sections occasionally, after use. The wing nut especially on the base of the stand seems to require the most attention. There are two soft plastic disks between the wood pieces at the base of the stand – I assume they are supposed to help keep the grip. It isn’t a huge problem at this point – the base tightens well enough – but just occasionally, I notice that it starts to slip a bit, so I give it an extra tightening up.

If you have hand problems like severe arthritis, you may find these plastic things hard to work with. When you tighten them, you really have to tighten them, and it can be stressful on sensitive hands. If you have tightened them quite tightly, they can also be difficult to loosen. I don’t have severe hand problems, but my fingers can get stiff and sore now and then, and when they are, I find the plastic wing nuts a little painful to adjust.

That said, once you have the stand in the general situation you prefer, and assuming your hands are functioning ok, just a little extra twist or tighten now and then will keep the stand in place for enough time to have a good stitching session or two without any problem.

When you get to the head that holds the hoop, from a distance (or in a product photo), you might be tempted to think that it is wood. But it isn’t. It’s molded plastic.

So far, the head is holding up fine.

The head is the most difficult part of the stand to adjust. But you do need to adjust it. The “mouth” of the head needs to point practically straight up, if you want to work on a hoop that is parallel to the floor.

Once the head is adjusted to where you like it, it stays put. In fact, it is so hard to move, that you can’t really use it to flip your work upwards and away from you, to access the back of the hoop to end threads. I think it’s created with that concept in mind – that you can push the whole head upwards and away from you, to get the back of the hoop to stand straight up in front of you to end your threads – but it’s really too tight to move, even when you loosen the wing nut.

But I could be wrong altogether. Maybe the frame is not constructed with accessing the back of the work in mind at all.

In any case, to access the back of my work, I simply unscrew the plastic screw at the top of the head and remove my hoop. When I’m finished, I stick it back in and tighten it. There’s no difficulty or high science behind screwing the hoop into the head – it’s easy and quick.

This is how the hoop fits into the head. It “bites” on the backside of the inside ring of the hoop, and the outside of the outermost ring of the hoop.

You can see, then, how this stand can hold practically any brand of normally styled embroidery hoop.

Obviously, the hardware area of the hoop can’t fit in the head, so you have to mount your hoop in the head anywhere else but where the hardware is. And in most cases, that is not a problem at all.

The stand will hold pretty much any size hoop.

That said, the smaller the hoop, the more of a gab there is between the lower jaw of the head and the inner ring of the hoop. Above, you can see a 4″ hoop in the head. Notice the gap.

It still holds the hoop well enough, but I do wonder if tightening that screw repeatedly (and you do have to really tighten it onto the hoop to get it to hold securely) will eventually warp a smaller hoop? I haven’t noticed that it affects the smaller hoops, but I’ve not used it frequently on 4″ hoops.

On a 6″ hoop, notice that the gap is almost nil.

Both of these hoops are 5/16″ Hardwicke Manor hoops (Klass & Gessmann hoops).

The narrower hoops – in this case, the 5/16″ hoops – fit in the mouth of the head, but the head tends to push on the back of the fabric that’s in the hoop, if you put the hoop all the way into the mouth. If you only catch the edge of the hoop in the mouth and with the screw, then the front edge of the head won’t push on the back of the fabric in the hoop.

Even if it does push a bit there, it’s not a lot, and it’s not going to affect your fabric in the hoop that much at all. Just be aware that with narrow hoops, the back of the fabric does come into contact with the head.

I’ve found that the 5/8″ deep Hardwicke Manor hoops work really well with this head – better than the thinner hoops (which is somewhat ironic, considering that Nurge’s hoops are thin).

So far, I’ve found that my favorite match, hoop-wise, with this stand is the 5/8″ deep, 7.5″ Hardwicke Manor (or Klass & Gessmann) hoop. It fits really well in the mouth without the edge of the mouth pushing on the back of the fabric, it gives me a good size hoop area for my embroidery, and the hoop with the fabric in it are not so heavy or large as to cause the stand to loosen at any of the joints.

You can see here that the 5/8″ deep hoop extends beyond the edge of the mouth.

Be aware that, when your embroidery fabric extends well beyond your hoop (say you’re embroidering something large, like a table cloth or something similar, and you have a lot of excepts fabric around your hoop), you’ll have to fold your fabric upwards so that there’s one layer of excess fabric between the screw and the hoop, and then the rest of the excess has to drape over the head and the top of the stand.

Again, nothing bad here, necessarily. As long as that plastic screw is clean, and as long as there’s no really dimensional embroidery stitches that end up between the screw and the hoop, there shouldn’t be a problem. You can always adjust the placement of the hoop, but if there’s a lot of excess fabric, you do have to manipulate the fabric so that the hoop will fit in the head.

Here’s a list of pros and cons, to put things in a nutshell.

Pros

Here are points I consider pros:

1. The stand works. It holds hoops, and holds them well, so that you can have both hands free when you stitch.

2. It is constructed well enough – maybe not perfect in the finishing details, but I had no problems with rough wood, splinters, or anything on mine.

3. It doesn’t tip and it’s easy to move around – not super heavy, but heavy enough and broad enough at the base that it doesn’t tip.

4. It has multiple points of adjustment, so that you can achieve the most comfortable situation of the stand for you.

5. It is affordable, clocking in under $70 in the US.

6. It is collapsible for storage and for travel.

Cons

And here are the points I consider cons:

1. You can’t access the back of your work without removing the hoop from the mouth and then repositioning the hoop once you’re finished with the back.

2. The wing nut things are a bit hard on the hands, especially for those who have hand problems (which is often the reason people look for a stand).

3. The stand occasionally needs readjusting and tightening with normal use.

4. The head is hard to move. But on the bright side, once it’s where you want it, it’s not going anywhere.

Where to Find It

In the US, you can find this particular Nurge floor stand available on Amazon. If you visit my Amazon Recommendations page here, it’s listed under Embroidery Tools & Accessories. I’ve also listed the Nurge sit-on / table stand there. The floor stand goes in and out of availability, it seems.

I haven’t found any locally owned needlework shops that carry them in the US.

In Australia, Create in Stitch carries them, as well as other needlework shops around the country.

In the UK, this particular configuration seems to be sold or listed as a table stand. I’ve seen it in Etsy shops in the UK and sometimes it shows up on Amazon. I’ve not found it online through locally owned brick and mortar shops, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Ask about or check your favorite shop!

This article contains an affiliate link to my Amazon Recommendations Page, which means that purchases made through that page result in a small commission for Needle ‘n Thread with no extra expense to you.