If you are a machine embroiderer you can probably get by with the software that came with your embroidery machine. However after many years of working with machine embroidery I have discovered some software tools that I simply can’t live without.
What you absolutely need in your arsenal is a program to view and organize your designs. The reason you need this is because windows and I assume mac will not show you the image of the design. The operating system simply does not know what the design is, so you will be left to guess if you are opening the design that you want. You therefore must have a good software program that will display the image of the design, making it easy to find what you are looking for and sort them into folders.
I would also recommend that you have a program that will convert your design into the required format for your embroidery machine. You will often find that when you download embroidery designs it is offered in particular formats. They may not be the formats that you require. If you have software that will convert the design it gives you the freedom to grab all of those awesome designs out there without worrying about which format it is in. The exception to this seems to be the .art format which I have not yet found a way of converting to this format, without having he specific software from Bernina.
The next must have is embroidery software to resize your designs. If the design is just a tad too big or small for your purpose you can easily reduce or increase the size by up to 20% in order to make it suit your purpose.
Some other great embroidery software to have is embroidery lettering software. Often you may be limited to a small number of fonts in your machine, a good lettering program together with some editing software and you can be creating some amazing unique embroidery designs.
You can also use a good editing program to split a design if it is too big to fit in your hoop, remove parts of the designs you don’t want or play around with the colours and more.
You may also consider embroidery digitizing, but be warned this is not a point and click venture, you will need to learn some skills to master the art, but there are some nice programs out there to get you started.
So what do I use? I am so glad you asked I use and recommend Buzz tools. I could not live without Buzz Xplore for viewing organizing and converting my designs. The beauty of Buzz tools is that they integrate with each other, so as to your collection of embroidery software they simply work together. For example if you are converting a pes file to a sew file in buzz Xplore it will call on Buzz size to resize the design to fit in your hoop.
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