Embroidery 101: How to Embroider a Wagon Wheel Stitch

Hi! I'm Natalie with Missouri Star Quilt Company and today on Embroidery 101 we are going to learn the wagon wheel stitch.

This is a fun stitch that makes really beautiful flowers. They look like chrysanthemums and they're just gorgeous. All right so we are going to
start with a knotted piece of embroidery floss. Thread it in your needle. You start on the outside of the point. What we're going to do is create some spokes for this wagon wheel. Now we have five drawn on here, but I think you can add as many as you like. These are just straight stitches. You want them to be nice and tight. I'm going to continue going around and I think I might add a few extra spokes to this wheel just to give it a little bit more dimension. I'm always going to the outer edge of the wagon wheel and then coming into the center with my stitches as we go along here.

All right, so we are up close right now. I've added some extra spokes. I do want to note you're going to want to make sure that they're an odd number. So I have nine Spokes and not 10 and that is because you want your weaving to overlap every other stitch. You want them to be going opposites and you need an odd number in order for that to work. So we're going to put our first. We're going to start in the middle, putting the needle right through the center and coming up. And then you can go whichever direction is more comfortable for you whether you're right or left-handed. But you're going to go over a stitch and under a stitch, and then over and under, all the way around. And I've just pulled a little knot so I'm going to pull that out there we go then I'm going to continue going over and under, over and under.

So see how? You can see I'll pull these out so you can see how they go over and under and now that I'm back at the beginning. Because I've got an odd number I'm going to go under the thread that I went over the first time, and over the next threads so it just continues that weave in an opposite manner as you go around. And you're going to pull these kind of tight, but not so tight that they overlap. You want your little circle to be tight enough that it stays in a circle, but not so tight that your threads end up pulling tight on top of the row that you did before. Okay, it gets a little bit easier as you go because you start to see the pattern form. They’re good here, though pull them out a bit.

Okay so I have some really cute little projects to show you. There are
some cute little wagon wheel flowers on this fun floral piece. This one here is a wagon wheel. It's got a little satin stitch center. And this one also, okay. And then this little hat, oh my goodness, look at how cute these are! I
absolutely love this. They do look like little chrysanthemums. They've got little French knots in the middle. This is just so stinking cute - I love it!

If you enjoyed this video, there's lots more where that came from. I have a whole channel called Embroidery 101 where I teach you what you need to know to get started and also give you tons of tips and ideas to refresh your memory and help you to advance in your embroidery journey. So click the link below and I hope you enjoy. Happy stitching!