Webs and Wheels

For the May session of the Guild, we had a Members Workshop, led by Janet Wright.



Janet's sample of whipped and woven spiders' wheels.


She showed us all how to work woven and backstitch spiders wheels, and challenged us to experiment by trying different options including:

• Varying thread type and thickness (wool, perle, stranded cotton)
• Varying the number of spokes, remembering that a woven wheel needs an odd number of spokes, but a backstitch wheel can be worked over any number
• Varying the size of the wheels

This was a lovely, lively session, with plenty of opportunity to chat to other members, and help each other to work the stitches.

If you would like to work on these stitches at home, here are some instructions on how to do them, courtesy of Sharon Boggon:

• Whipped Spiders' Wheel
• Woven Spiders' Wheel

We also decided that we would like to have a greater focus on hand-stitching, and are going to work on one stitch per month, between Guild meetings, and sharing our finished work. Some members would like to make samplers, while others would like to use the pieces for cards, boxes, and other small items. There won't be any pressure on members to do this stitching between sessions; it'll give us an opportunity to improve our hand stitching and learn some new stitches, or revisit stitches which we haven't used for a while. We have asked members to bring 10p to each session, to cover the cost of an info sheet for the stitch being worked on.

Janet brought her samples worked for another group - this is the kind of thing we could create. They'll be great when stuck working out which stitch to use: