So you've purchased an embroidery machine and now you're thinking about digitizing software.
Ask yourself this question: will I be buying my designs or creating my designs?
There are lots of designs out there on the web and in your local sewing shop. Your embroidery machine probably even came with several. And if you're just embroidering purchased designs for friends and family, you won't need a lot of software. Why do you need software at all, you wonder, if you've purchased the design and you're not going to create your own?
First and foremost, all embroidery designs are not created equally. There are some excellently digitized designs out there, but not all designs are well digitized. Furthermore, all designs will not stitch out equally well on all fabric types. As a general rule of thumb, the more stable the fabric, the better your stitching results. So heavy canvas should always produce better results than a light-weight knit tee shirt. That's fine if you're only going to stitch out on stable wovens, but that's rarely the case. You want to stitch your purchased designs on knit tee shirts and pola tec vests and terry cloth towels.
Most embroidery machines will allow you to resize a design using the built-in machine software, but you cannot affect the design in other important ways like changing density, underlay, or push and pull compensation settings so that your design is appropriate for the fabric on which you want to embroider.
This is where the need for software comes in: you need software that will either allow you to make changes manually or that will alter a design for your depending on the fabric you want to use. Floriani's Stitch 2 Perfection allows you to apply changes to a design based on a selected fabric type. You don't have to understand density, push and pull compensation, or underlay types to do this. You tell the software what kind of fabric you're using and it understands what has to happen to a design to make it work better on that fabric.
Things to remember when you're working with a purchased design:
Keep in mind that, even if you're doing it as a hobby, machine embroidery isn't cheap. Even if you ignore the initial cost of an embroidery machine and possible software, there are still designs, thread, stabilizer, and apparel or accessories to purchase. You'll need some kind of computer, laptop or desktop. This doesn't even include the possibility of needing a digital camera, scanner, and thumb drives.
Tomorrow we'll talk about what software you need if you want to do machine embroidery as a home-based business.