Free embroidery digitizer

Draw it, letter it, sew it.

EmbroideryCraft turns your shapes and lettering into machine embroidery: satin, fill, appliqué, monograms and team names, saved as Tajima DST for your machine. It's free and open source, with no subscription.

Download free See all features
WindowsmacOSLinux Tajima DSTEarly version
The EmbroideryCraft editor: tools on the left, a design in the hoop, sewing order and properties on the right

Everything it does

You edit shapes, not stitches. Change a setting and the stitches are rebuilt.

Stitch types

  • Running and triple run stitch
  • Satin columns with centre, edge or centre+edge underlay, pull compensation and splitting of long stitches
  • Tatami fill at any angle, with holes, brick offsets and underlay. Holes are never crossed.
  • Auto satin: any filled shape is split into strokes, each sewn straight across
  • Appliqué: placement line, machine stop, tack-down (run or zigzag), stop to cut, satin border

Lettering

  • Type with any installed font. Holes in letters like O, A and B are handled.
  • Text on an arc (top or bottom), or along any line you draw
  • Automatic kerning, plus spacing for individual letter pairs
  • Joined lettering: running stitches inside the letters instead of trims ("Karate" goes from 23 trims to 5)
  • Lettering stays editable, so you can retype it, or change its font, size or arc, at any time

Monograms, badges and team names

  • Monograms of two or three initials, in an optional circle, oval, diamond or square satin frame
  • Team names: paste a list of names and get one DST file per name
  • Background picture at real size (in mm) to trace a logo or photo. It is never sewn.
  • Show it on a product (gi, belt, polo, T-shirt, cap, jacket, tote bag or your own photo) and save a mockup picture for your customer

Japanese, Korean and custom fonts

  • EmbroideryCraft fonts (.ecfont): convert a computer font once, and lettering is instant and sews the same every time
  • Font editor with a satin direction tool, or draw a new font from scratch
  • Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Hangul, including vertical text (縦書き) for belts and gi
  • Font lists show each font's name in that font (空手道 / 태권도)

Drawing and editing

  • Select, node edit, polyline, rectangle, ellipse, freehand, Bézier curve and hole tools
  • Resize, stretch and rotate handles (Shift for 15° steps), flip, duplicate
  • Shape add, subtract, overlap and exclude, holes included
  • Group and ungroup, align, centre in the hoop, change the sewing order
  • Undo and redo, hover help on every tool, and project files (.embcraft)

Ready for the machine

  • Tajima DST export and import, with trims, colour changes and jumps
  • Stitch player: watch the design sew out stitch by stitch
  • Exact start points for every object, and a machine start/end position
  • Hoop sizes (presets or custom), and a trim setting for your machine
  • Open any DST file to check it, plus a command-line tool for batch work
Early version. EmbroideryCraft is young. DST output is checked with an independent decoder, but please do a test sew-out on scrap fabric before using it on a real garment. If something goes wrong, tell us.

See it in action

Real screenshots of EmbroideryCraft . More in the manual.

The lettering window with a font list and size, kerning, arc and vertical text settings
Lettering with any font, arcs, kerning and vertical Japanese text.
A mockup picture of a design on a T-shirt with a close-up, size, stitch count and thread colours
Mockup pictures to send to customers for approval.
The stitch player replaying a design stitch by stitch
Stitch player: watch the design sew before it touches fabric.
The window that converts a computer font into an EmbroideryCraft satin font
Satin fonts made once from your computer fonts, Kanji and Hangul included.

Free forever

MIT or Apache-2.0 licence. No subscription, no account, no watermark.

Built not to crash

Bad or damaged files give you an error message instead of crashing. The same design always produces the same stitches.

Windows, Mac and Linux

One app on all three, with ⌘ shortcuts and trackpad gestures on the Mac.

Who makes it

EmbroideryCraft is made by Francis Croisetière. The code is written together with Claude, Anthropic's AI, which also helps check and fix the bugs you report. Every change is reviewed before it's released.