My hoop is made of cotton net dyed with iDye from Dharma Trading and boned with hoop boning I bought locally. It's loosely based on this hoop and this hoop, both at the Met, and made with the shape of my skirt in mind. The first hoop was my main inspiration. It appears to be very straightforward and use straight panels, not shaped panels.
To start, I took my roll of boning and held it around my hips to see how wide I wanted my hoop to be. Here I am holding my cut piece of boning around my hips. And that is my dress bodice!
My larger piece of boning ended up being about 64 inches around (measured as finished with the overlap in place), and the smaller piece of boning ended up being about 53 inches around. The tape ties that hold it into an oval shape are about 8 inches long on the top hoop (the smaller one) and 12 inches long on the bottom hoop. I used two widths of netting. I didn't try to make it the same size as the boning, but chose to gather it over the boning instead.
I cut the length of the netting a little longer than I needed so that I could level it.
