Guides
Digitizing is not converting a file. It is deciding where every needle goes – which direction each shape is filled, which colour goes down first, where the machine jumps and where it cuts. A picture holds none of that, which is why no Save As has ever produced a stitch file.
TechniquePatchSize178 mmStitches44 297Threads4Thread103.5 m
A vector – an SVG, a PDF, an Illustrator file – beats every picture, because the shapes are already drawn and nothing has to be guessed at. If all you have is a picture, send the biggest one, cropped to the mark, on a plain or transparent background. Nothing downstream can put back detail that was never in the pixels.
The size decides what can be sewn at all. A satin stitch holds from about 1.0 mm wide; below that it is a run stitch and reads as fuzz. So the thinnest line in your artwork, scaled to the width you want, is the whole question. At 20 mm a typical logo’s thinnest line is 0.32 mm and gone; at 60 mm it is 0.97 mm and clean.
A band gets satin across it. A broad field gets rows. An emblem radiates from one centre. A rule that gives every shape the same fill is the difference between a mark that looks sewn and one that looks printed on – and it is the part a person is really being paid for.
Every stitch, at the size you asked for, on the screen. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the only one that catches the closed-up lettering and the line that turned into fuzz. If it is not right on screen, it will not be right on fabric.
Embroidery digitizing is the work of turning artwork into a stitch file – a list of needle positions, thread changes and trims that an embroidery machine executes literally. It is not a conversion. A machine cannot read a PNG or an SVG, and nothing in those files says which direction a stitch should run, how dense a fill should be, or where the thread travels between two shapes.
Those decisions are the craft. Get them wrong and the fabric puckers, the letters close up, and the thread breaks on the machine.
A stitch file can only be as sharp as the drawing it came from. Nothing downstream puts back an edge the file never had – not our engine, not anyone else’s, not a person with forty years at the machine.
That cuts both ways, and the second half is the useful one: give us a clean drawing and the mark comes out clean, at any size you like.
An SVG, an AI file, or a PNG at least 2,000 px wide. Vector has no size at all – it is right at 20 mm and right at 300 mm.
A logo lifted off a website is a few hundred pixels with the edges already softened. We will sew it, and it will look like what it is.
Above 250 mm the engine reads 2,000 points across the mark. Below that, letters go soft – so the workshop says so before you spend the time.
Anyone can make a small file look big. We would rather tell you the drawing is too small than quietly sew something soft and let you find out on fifty garments.
Remember, Good in - good out
Yes. The four decisions above are the job, and software can make them – the question is only whether it makes them well. Drop the logo, set the width in millimetres, look at every stitch, and download the format your machine reads.
A person takes a day or two, sometimes more for a hard mark. Here it is seconds, and the workshop prints the exact time in milliseconds under the mark.
Thin lines, small type, gradients and photographs. Thread comes in whole colours and has a minimum width, so anything that depends on a fade or on a line under 1 mm has to change before it can be sewn.
All four happen here in seconds, and nobody touches the file afterwards. Studio’s first month is $9 for 20 files, then $29 a month, or from $0.40 a file on a yearly plan – and you see the whole mark before you pay for any of it.
Start from your file
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