What the check looks at
An embroidery file will not tell you whether it is any good. It holds a list of needle penetrations, and the machine is the one that discovers, on the first piece, that the density snaps needles or that the design does not fit the hoop. This tool reads the file and measures what can be known before stitching.
- Density, in stitches per square millimetre. Ordinary tatami fill sits around 1. Above 3.5 the fabric turns to cardboard, puckers and breaks needles — nearly always the signature of a design scaled down without recalculating the stitches.
- Stitch lengths. Below 0.3 mm the machine skips the stitch or sews on the spot and knots. Above 12.7 mm it simply cannot reach: it splits the stitch arbitrarily or leaves a loop.
- Jumps and trims. A jump over 8 mm with no trim is a thread to cut by hand, sometimes on the right side of the garment.
- Size and hoop. The real footprint of the design, and the smallest common hoop that takes it once the area lost under the clamp is accounted for.
- Thread and run time. Top thread and bobbin needed per piece, and machine time at 700 stitches per minute — enough to quote a job.
The three most common diagnoses
“My embroidery puckers.” Look at density. Above 2 stitches/mm² on knit, jersey or sweatshirt, the thread pulls harder than the fabric can take. Two remedies: open the design up by 20 % — row spacing goes from 0.35 to 0.42 mm — and use a firm cut-away stabiliser rather than tear-away.
“My needle keeps breaking.” Look for very short stitches and high density. A design bought then halved in the machine’s own software keeps the same stitch count over a quarter of the area: density quadruples. Such a file has to be redigitised at the right size, not resized.
“It does not fit my hoop.” The size a seller advertises is the size of the artwork, not the hoop you need: add roughly 5 mm on each side for the area lost under the clamp. The check names the smallest common hoop directly.
What a file cannot tell you
No analysis replaces a test on a scrap of the real fabric. The file knows nothing about the material, the stabiliser, thread tension or how you hoop — and those decide half the result. The check tells you whether the file is sound; it says nothing about your polo shirt.
What if the file is bad?
An over-dense or up-scaled file cannot be repaired by changing a setting: the stitches are frozen. The right move is to go back to the original artwork and rebuild the file at the size you want, which is what the image converter does. If the machine file is all you have, the studio can redigitise it: it recovers the regions, outlines and satin columns and rebuilds an editable design whose density can be set again.
Frequently asked questions
Is my file uploaded to your servers?
No. Reading and analysis happen entirely in your browser. Not one byte of the file leaves your computer, and nothing is stored.
Which formats are supported?
DST (Tajima and industrial machines), PES (Brother, Baby Lock), JEF (Janome, Elna), VP3 (Husqvarna Viking, Pfaff), EXP (Melco, Bernina), HUS and XXX. Thread colours are read when the format carries them; DST carries none, so the preview uses a palette to tell the blocks apart.
What density should I aim for?
Row spacing of 0.35 to 0.45 mm, roughly 1 to 1.5 stitches/mm² in a fill. Use 0.40 to 0.45 mm on knit and jersey to avoid puckering, 0.50 mm on leather to limit perforation.
How much thread does an embroidery use?
The estimate counts about 1.8 m of top thread and 1 m of bobbin per metre of stitch path, roughly 5.5 m of thread per 1,000 stitches in an ordinary fill. It is an order of magnitude for ordering cones, not a measurement.
Do I need an account?
No, and there is nothing to install. The free account exists to produce a machine file, not to read one.
Go further
The studio is free to draw, open and check designs. Your first machine file takes five minutes.
Updated 2026-09-24.