Woven wheel roses are a wonderful and easy way to add hand embroidered flowers to your pieces! I incorporate this stitch into a lot of my patterns and kit designs, and you'll find they're a lot of fun to stitch!
In the video tutorial at the bottom of this post, I'll show you how I stitch a woven wheel rose using five spokes; you can also make smaller rosebuds by using just three spokes!
STEPS AND TIPS:
Start by stitching an ODD number of spokes using straight stitch. I'm using five spokes in the example below, but you can use 3 or even 7! The important thing to keep in mind is that your spokes are odd, not even - if you stitch an even number, the weaving portion of this stitch won't work!
Try to keep your spokes as tight as possible. You can absolutely still do this stitch with loose spokes, but it'll be a much more frustrating process.
Once you've stitched your spokes, bring up your needle with the "petal" color in between two of your spokes - you'll want to bring it up close to the middle, but not directly through the middle. This will eventually be covered up by the rest of your stitches.
Begin weaving your petal color over, under, over, etc. your spokes. For my first few "rounds," I like to pull a bit more tightly than once I get to the edge of the flower - this helps me create a nice sturdy base in the middle.
This stitch looks a little weird until you've really started to fill it in - so don't get discouraged! Keep weaving your floss over and under, over and under, until your flower starts to take shape!
When tying off your petal color, try not to pull too tightly - if you pull too tightly at the end, you risk unraveling all of your hard work!
Sound confusing? If you're more of a visual learner (like me!), take a look at this tutorial video!