Free embroidery digitizer that measures the artwork first

Because the file those sites return does not work, and this one says so before taking your time rather than after. Thread has exactly one value per area — there is no half-tone, no opacity and no blending in a machine fill — so a continuous-tone image has to be cut into flat bands before it can be sewn at all, and the bands have no boundaries an algorithm can give a sensible direction to. What comes out is tens of thousands of stitches in arbitrary patches that read as mud from a meter away and take an hour on the machine. If you want to see it rather than take it on trust, the page will draw the fill for a refused picture on request, with no download attached, because it is a more convincing argument than this paragraph.

Satin is one span of thread laid straight across a shape, side by side with the next span, which is what gives lettering and borders their glossy unbroken surface. Fill is the same idea broken into short stitches because the shape is too wide to cross in one. The switch between them is a physical limit rather than a style: a stitch much longer than about 10 mm has nothing holding its middle down, so it snags on a button, a finger or a washing machine and pulls into a loop. This page classifies every run it finds by its own width and satins anything under the threshold you set, defaulting to 6 mm, which is conservative and safe on garments.

Three jobs, and on a pile fabric the whole design depends on them: it holds the nap down so the visible stitches sit above it rather than disappearing into it, it pins the cloth to the backing so the top layer cannot drag it as the thread tightens, and it leaves the needle something firm to enter so an edge stays on the line it was drawn on. What this page lays down is a lattice — a coarse pass at right angles to the fill, at a quarter of its density. That is a sensible default and nothing more: a cap, a towel and a knit each want a different underlay, and picking between them is a judgement about the fabric in your hand that no page can make for you.

Thread under tension pulls the fabric inward across the direction the stitches run, so a shape sews narrower than it was drawn and gaps open up between neighboring colors. Compensation cancels it by extending every run slightly at both ends before the file is written — 0.2 mm a side is a normal starting point on a firm woven fabric with cutaway backing, and a stretchy knit can want twice that. Too much is its own fault: over-compensated shapes overlap and the design looks swollen, with colors creeping over each other's edges. The honest way to set it is to sew a test on the actual fabric, measure the gap, and put half of it back on each side.

Because thread is a fixed physical size and your artwork is not. A stitch is roughly 0.4 mm of thread lying next to another 0.4 mm of thread, and that never changes no matter how small you make the design — so at 50 mm across, a detail that takes up two percent of the width is one millimeter, which is on the edge of what a fill can hold, and at 100 mm the same detail is two millimeters and is comfortable. This is why commercial embroidery has conventional sizes and why a logo that looks fine on a jacket back falls apart on a cap front. The size slider is the most powerful control on this page for exactly that reason, and the assessment recalculates against it every time you move it.

For simple flat artwork at a sensible size, yes, and it has been for years — a two- or three-color logo with clean edges at 70 to 100 mm, on a stable woven fabric with cutaway backing, comes out of an automatic fill looking like what a person would have punched. What it will not do is a script typeface at 15 mm, a design with a dozen colors touching each other, anything on a knit or a pile fabric, or a shape whose stitch direction carries meaning. The commercial rule of thumb is worth borrowing: if you would have to explain to the customer why it looks like that, pay somebody to punch it.

Yes, and it is the underlay showing through. The layer beneath is drawn as a hairline in gray so it does not read at the same weight as the thread on top, but it is genuinely there and it is genuinely stitches — it is counted in the total, in the run time and in the thread. Turn the show-underlay box off to see only what will be visible on the finished piece, and turn the underlay itself off if you are sewing onto something firm enough not to need it. The stitch-type table keeps them separate on purpose: satin and fill are what somebody looks at, and the underlay column is what the machine spends time on before either of them starts.