How to turn a logo into an embroidery file

First: what is an embroidery file?

PES, DST and JEF files aren't pictures, they're directions: where the needle goes down, in what order, when to trim, when to change colour. The same logo digitized well sews clean; digitized badly it breaks thread, puckers fabric and turns small text into a blur. Saving a PNG under a new extension doesn't work: the artwork has to be turned into stitches. That job is called digitizing (or punching).

1. 1

   Start from clean artwork

   A PNG with a transparent background, or an SVG, works best. Blurry, shadowed or gradient-heavy images add colours and defects. If the logo has a flat-colour version, use it.

2. 2

   Pick the size up front

   In embroidery the size is part of the design: blowing a 90 mm left-chest logo up to 250 mm spoils the density and stitch types. Common sizes: left chest 80–100 mm on the longest side, cap front 50–60 mm tall, full back 250–300 mm wide.

3. 3

   Pick your machine's format

   Brother and Baby Lock read PES, Janome JEF, Husqvarna Viking and Pfaff VP3, Bernina EXP, and Tajima and other multi-needle machines DST. DST and EXP carry no thread colours: you thread up from the production sheet.

4. 4

   Check before you sew

   Watch the file in a simulation. Cells with more than 6 needle holes per mm², stitches under 0.3 mm, long jumps with no trim and text under 5 mm tall cause trouble. Sew the first one on a scrap.

By hand or automatic?

A digitizer drawing your logo by hand gets a good result, usually in about a day, priced by stitch count. Automatic tools return a file in seconds; what makes the difference is measuring the file before it's sewn. Our tool measures every file for coverage, short stitches, thread pile-ups and small text, and shows you where any problem is.

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