The woven wheel, also known as the woven spider web stitch, is a great example of a simple stitch that is versatile and beautiful. The woven wheel makes terrific flowers in almost any kind of thread. It’s used widely in ribbon embroidery for making roses, but it works well in surface embroidery using cotton floss, perle cotton, wool (it looks great in wool!), silk, and really, any kind of thread!
In the photo above, the stitch is worked with spokes of #8 perle cotton, and woven with coton a broder #25 in a variegated red. If you use a variegated thread for this type of stitch, it’s very easy to shade the stitch without ever having to change your thread. You just have to work out where to cut the variegated thread from the skein to get the shading you want.
On the box above (which I stitched ages and ages ago), the large cream-colored flower in the center is the woven wheel stitch, worked with silk ribbon. You can create very effective roses with silk ribbon using the woven wheel stitch – the ribbon tends to fold back on itself as the stitch builds into many layers of rose petals.
When working this stitch, it is essential that you use an odd number of spokes to build the woven wheel on. If you use an even number of spokes, the weaving will not alternate from spoke to spoke, and the result will not be the same at all!
Here’s the video for the woven wheel stitch (also known as “woven spider web”). I hope you enjoy it!
