Wheel of the Year Embroidery, Finished!

 For many many years I've been a devoted reader of Carina's Craft Blog, and over the years I've purchased and embroidered several of her patterns, several of which you can see here. At the end of 2021 (yes this has been a long-term WIP) she announced a pattern based on the Celtic wheel of the year.  It features 8 small embroideries for Winter Solstice, Imbolc, Spring Equinox, Beltane, Summer Solstice, Lughnasadh, the Autumn Equinox, and Samhain. 

The patterns were initially released over the course of the year (you can still buy the whole pattern in her shop) and were designed to be stitched in wreath.  I thought they were fantastic and signed up for the stitch along.  I kept up with the embroideries, but since I decided to do them on different rainbow fabric after finishing them, I had 8 separate embroideries and no time to assemble them.  

Over the last several years I've worked on it between projects whenever I had time and finally got to the point where I felt like the hand embroidery was done and it was time to finally finish it up.  I didn't want such fun handwork stuck in a drawer.  

I've shared a couple of snapshots over the years but finally I'm sharing the whole project.  

I transferred the patterns to the fabric using a crayola washable marker, except on the really dark fabric when I used a white pencil.  I like those markers for pattern marking and I have good luck getting them to wash out.

This was Imbolc in progress.  

And here's the winter solstice in progress.  You can see the white pencil in the background.

After finishing the embroideries, I had to applique them down to something and I didn't want to turn the edges, so I stitched them to a backing fabric and turned them inside out.  The round edges didn't turn out very round, but as I was going to applique the curcles down using decorative stitches, I managed to hide most of it.

This one is Samhain after turning it.  You can see the uneven edges.  On the other hand this is my very favorite of the designs.  I love the thistles so much as well as the pinecones and the pumpkin.  Just so delightful.  

I appliqued them down in a wreath to this blue piece of damask fabric I had in my stash, then did a bunch more hand embroidery around the circles and in the corners.  To finish it up I quilted it to batting and backing and then mounted it on stretcher bars.  I decided to turn it into a clock for my studio.

Here you can see on the outer edges I added some little shapes filled with Bottensom embroidery, another technique I learned from Carina's blog.

I love the way this turned out, so bright and colorful and so much fun to stitch.  I also got the 2023 wheel of the year pattern which I haven't even started on, but alas, I have several other partially finished embroidery projects to work on in between my quilting and knitting, so progress on this is slow.  It just makes me happy to walk into my studio and see it hanging on my bright yellow wall.