When doing embroidery you have to have something hooped whether it is the stabilizer or the article, that is how it is moved to get the stitching done in the right place, you can manuely do embroidery work on your regular sewing machine, it is harder and you have to do all the moving of the fabric, there are all sorts of stabilizers to help you do a large variety of different projects, Here is the link that I was saying earlier to help with some of your questions, it can answer a lot of questions for you, it is a very user friendly site with a lot of information on it,
http://www.embroiderylibraryprojects.com/
It is not law, you will find somethings work better for you than others,