How to work Whipped Wheel Stitch

Whipped wheel is also known as whipped spider’s wheel, raised spider’s web wheel, ribbed wheel, back stitched wheel, and back stitched spider’s web. All of these names do little to indicate how much fun this stitch can be. It would be one of my favourite textured stitches. If you look closely at much of my stitching you will find them tucked into all sorts of places.

How to work Whipped Wheel stitch

Whipped wheel creates a ribbed disk that can be worked on an even or uneven number of spokes.

Start with a single fly stitch. Each side of the fly stitch tail add two straight stitches of equal length. You should have a circle which has five ‘spokes’ to form the foundation.

Bring your thread up at the centre of the wheel.
From this point onwards your needle does not go through the fabric so use a blunt tapestry needle to avoid splitting the foundation stitches.
Slide the needle under two threads and pull your thread through.
Move back one stitch and once again slide the needle under two threads.
Pull the thread through and you have whipped the first spoke.
This process is best described as making a spiral of back stitches over the spokes.

Repeat this action, whipping each spoke as you progress around the wheel until the circle is filled.

As I said Whipped wheel is a stitch that is  lots of fun and once you have mastered them they are quite quick. You can used them alone as an accent stitch, a point of colour, an interesting texture, or they can be scattered over an area almost like a powdered filling.

Whipped wheel stitch is great in contemporary embroidery. This sample have whipped wheels worked in cotton perle #8 (the blue sttiches) and rayon thread (the bronze gold stitches.

This sample is whipped wheels worked over machine embroidery. The foundation fabric is hand painted felt.

Thread Twisties!

Experimenting with different threads can be expensive, as you would normally have to buy a whole skein of each type of thread. So I have made up my thread twisties which are a combination of different threads to use in creative hand embroidery. These enable you to try out stitching with something other than stranded cotton. For the price of just a few skeins, you can experiment with a bundle of threads of luscious colours and many different textures.

These are creative embroiders threads. With them, I hope to encourage you to experiment. Each Twistie is a thread bundle containing silk, cotton, rayon and wool. Threads range from extra fine (the same thickness as 1 strand of embroidery floss) to chunky couchable textured yarns. All threads have a soft and manageable drape so that twisting them around a needle makes experimental hand embroidery an interesting journey rather than a battle.  Many are hand dyed by me. All are threads I use. You may find a similar thread twist but no two are identical.

You will find my thread twisties in the Pintangle shop here.