Tips and tricks

Small choices make a big difference to how a design stitches. Here’s what we’ve learned about getting clean, machine-ready files from your pictures.

Start with the right picture

• Flat colors and clear edges win. Logos, clip art, badges and bold line drawings turn into stitches beautifully. Soft gradients, shadows and fine texture don’t, because thread comes in solid colors.
• A vector file (SVG) is the best starting point. Its edges are exact and its colors are flat, so it converts more cleanly than a picture of the same artwork, and it can be made any size without going blurry. Save it as a plain SVG. If it has words in it, convert the text to outlines first (in Inkscape: Path, then Object to Path), because live text is drawn with fonts installed on our server, which may not match yours. Pictures linked from another file aren’t loaded, so embed them or upload them on their own.
• Otherwise use a big, sharp image. A small or blurry picture gives fuzzy edges. Anything from a few hundred pixels up works. Files can be up to 12 MB (PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, WebP or SVG).
• A plain background helps. White or a single solid color is easiest. The site can leave the background out for you (see below).
• Keep lettering bold. Thin strokes and very small letters, roughly under 2–3 mm across the stroke once stitched, tend to look rough. A chunkier font, or a larger design, stitches far more cleanly.

Choose the image type

Not sure which to pick? The design studio's "New to LinkyHoop? Guide me" quiz (also reachable any time from the empty studio's "take the quick guide" link) asks a few plain questions and sets this, your machine's file format, and your hoop size for you.

The Image type setting tells the site how to read your picture:

• Logo or clip art is for flat-color artwork. This is the best starting point for most images. Areas wider than about 2 mm are filled, and narrower ones, such as outlines, are sewn in satin so they stay bold and unbroken.
• Line drawing is for pen-style art, outlines and signatures, which become clean single lines.
• Simple photo reduces a photo to a handful of flat colors first. Works best with a clear subject. Tick Background remover to stitch only the main subject, and use the Quick preview to see the simplified colors before the full preview catches up. If the background is busy (a room, a garden), the remover can take parts of your subject and keep bits of the room. Tick Cut out the subject (experimental) to have the site look for the subject in the middle of the picture instead. It works on color, so it can miss part of the subject or keep something beside it: check the Quick preview. A snapshot with strong light and shadow also comes out blotchy in a handful of flat colors. Photos of pets and people convert much better as clip art (flat colors and a dark outline), which is what the Logo or clip art type is made for.

If a result looks wrong, try another image type before adjusting anything else.

Size and detail

• Design width sets the size. Type the width you want into the box, drag the slider, or drag the round handle at the corner of the design in the preview. It’s the width of the stitched design itself, so a design set to 100 mm measures 100 mm across. Fit design to hoop scales it to fill your hoop, and the mm / cm / in buttons change the units.
• Smaller designs stitch faster and use less thread, but fine details disappear as you shrink them. If small features are vanishing, make the design larger or lower Smallest detail under Fine-tune.
• Under Fine-tune, Edge smoothing softens jagged outlines, and Fill row spacing controls how densely areas are filled. A bigger number means fewer stitches, which helps if fabric is puckering.
• Use Rotate 90° if a wide design would fit your hoop better on its side.
• Use Zoom above the preview to inspect fine areas.

Fabric and garment

The same design needs stitching differently on a T-shirt, a towel and a leather bag. Choose what you’re sewing on under Fabric and the site adjusts how the design is stitched: how tightly it’s filled, how much stabilising stitching goes underneath, how far shapes are grown to make up for thread pulling them in, and how small a detail can be before it would only vanish into the fabric.

• They’re starting points, not guarantees. They follow the usual rules of thumb for each kind of fabric, but we haven’t sewn every one out on every machine, and fabrics vary a lot. Sew a test on scrap of the same fabric and stabilizer first.
• Everything can still be changed. Choosing a fabric sets the stitching sliders and the underlay under Fine-tune, so you can adjust any of them afterwards. Choosing a different fabric, or a different image type, sets them again.
• The stabilizer, topping and needle are suggestions to start from. Your machine’s manual and your own experience count for more. The production sheet lists them with the design.
• Small details are dropped on purpose on towels, fleece and other fabrics with a nap or pile, because a thin line simply disappears into the loops. If you need small lettering on them, make it larger, or stitch it on a smoother fabric such as a patch.
• Leather and vinyl don’t forgive mistakes. Every needle hole stays, so test on a scrap and don’t unpick a design and sew it again in the same spot.

Sizes for a garment

Under Design size, Size for a spot on a garment sets the width to the usual size for that spot. The design is fitted inside that size, so a tall design gets narrower, not taller. The height follows your picture, and you can still change the width afterwards. It doesn’t change your hoop, so pick one big enough (or let the site split the design; see “Designs bigger than your hoop”).

• Left chest logo: fits in 90 mm (3.5 in) × 75 mm (3.0 in). The usual logo over the heart on a shirt or polo: about 3.5 in wide.
• Cap front: fits in 100 mm (3.9 in) × 50 mm (2.0 in). The front panel of a cap: about 4 in wide and 2 in tall at most.
• Pocket or sleeve: fits in 75 mm (3.0 in) × 75 mm (3.0 in). A pocket or sleeve: about 3 in square.
• Towel, tote or bag: fits in 100 mm (3.9 in) × 100 mm (3.9 in). A corner of a towel or a small bag: about 4 in square.
• Center chest, full front: fits in 250 mm (9.8 in) × 250 mm (9.8 in). A large design across the front: about 10 in. It needs a big hoop or several hoopings.
• Jacket or shirt back: fits in 280 mm (11.0 in) × 280 mm (11.0 in). A big design across the back: about 11 in, up to 12. It needs a big hoop or several hoopings.
• Patch or badge: fits in 80 mm (3.1 in) × 80 mm (3.1 in). A patch sewn on its own to attach later: about 3 in.

These are common sizes, not rules: a child’s shirt or a small cap wants smaller, and a customer’s own layout comes first.

Colors and thread

• Fewer colors means fewer thread changes. Lower Colors, at most to simplify. On a single-needle machine every color change is a stop and a rethread.
• Click a thread’s spool in the list to choose a different color. Your color choices are used in the download, and Reset colors puts the originals back.
• Turn off a color you don’t want. Letters sometimes come with a white “fill-in” behind them. Switch that thread off in the list and it’s left out of the design and the download. See lettering and text below.
• Hide just one part of a color, not the whole thread. If a color has more than one separate piece — both eyes on a face, say — its row opens to a list of “N pieces”, each with its own switch, so you can hide one eye and keep the other. A “piece” is a real, separate run of stitches, not a shape the site recognizes, so two shapes stitched very close together may count as one piece, and one shape with fine detail in it may take a few pieces to fully hide — see hiding one piece of a color below. This isn’t offered for a design split across several hoopings, and the production sheet doesn’t yet reflect a hidden piece — only a whole color switched off — so check the download itself.
• Try different fabric colors in the preview bar. A white fill you can’t see against white fabric shows up on a dark one.
• PES and JEF files snap each color to that machine’s own thread chart, so an unusual color may shift slightly on those formats. Check your thread spools against the preview.
• Match to a thread chart (above the thread list) shows, under each color, the closest real thread in that chart with a plain grade: exact, close, similar, or nearest available. Automatic picks the chart that goes with your file format, so a PES uses Brother’s colors and a JEF uses Janome’s. For PES and JEF it also shows what’s in your file: the color your machine’s screen will name for each thread. That’s not always the closest one, so choose real threads by the color and the “closest” match, not by the machine’s name.

Hiding one piece of a color

A shape you can see as one thing — an eye, a spot, a letter’s dot — isn’t always one piece to the site. If it has any fine detail inside it, such as a highlight dot or a shade of shadow, it can be sewn as several small pieces sitting right next to each other. Hiding just one of them may only remove a sliver and leave the rest looking odd, rather than clearing the whole shape.

• Turn pieces off one at a time and watch the preview rather than guessing which single one you need. The pieces that make up one visual shape are usually grouped together in the list, in sewing order, so once you find the first one the rest are nearby.
• Watch each piece’s own stitch count next to its switch. A shape made of several pieces often has one bigger piece (the main fill) alongside a few much smaller ones (thin slivers around a highlight or a shading line) — the small ones are easy to miss if you only look at the first piece.
• Turn them back on any time — nothing is lost. Hiding a piece never changes the stitches themselves, only whether that piece is included.

The production sheet

The Production sheet (PDF) button under Download makes a one-page PDF for whoever sews the design: a picture of the stitches, the size, stitch count and sewing time, and every thread in sewing order with its color swatch, its stitch count and its closest match in the chart you picked. A design sewn in several hoopings also gets a list of the files in order. Print it and keep it with the hoop. It follows what you’ve set on the page: your color edits, any thread you’ve switched off, and whether lock stitches are on.

Lettering and text

When you convert words, letters with a closed shape inside them, such as o, d, a, e, b, p, q and g, usually come out with the middle of the letter filled in with a patch of thread, most often white (the color of the paper the letters were on). The site can’t tell that the inside of an “o” is empty space rather than part of the design, so it stitches it. You almost never want that patch.

• The Lettering image type is set up for words, alone or next to a picture. Bold letters are filled solid instead of stitched as satin bars, each letter treated the same way, and the inside of letters like o, d and p, and of rings, is left open, so there’s no white to toggle off. Thin lettering stays satin. It works best at larger sizes: on small letters the strokes get thin, and thin strokes are satin again. It only opens centers when the paper around your picture is a plain color, and a picture saved with a transparent background has no paper to compare with. You can fine-tune it under Fine-tune with Fill bold strokes from and Open the centers of letters and rings.
• On the site: switch off the toggle beside the white spool under “Thread colors”. The color is removed from the preview and from the download, and the stitch count updates. To spot every fill-in, try a dark fabric color in the preview bar.
• On the machine: if you’d rather keep the file as it is, skip that color when the machine reaches it (or use your machine’s color-skip feature) so the letters stay open.
• One step for dark letters on plain white: under Fine-tune, set Background color to “Leave out everywhere”. That removes the white everywhere at once, including inside the letters. It removes that color from the whole design, so any white you wanted to keep goes too.
• Lettering combined with a picture: the letters get filled in just the same when they’re part of a bigger image, such as a logo with a picture and a name under it. “Leave out everywhere” clears the white inside every letter in one go, which is quicker than hunting for each one. Check the picture afterwards: white parts of the picture itself are removed too. On white fabric that makes no difference, but on a colored fabric those parts will show the fabric instead. If you need them stitched, leave the white in and skip it on the machine only where it fills the letters.
• Letters sewn on a colored shape, such as white letters on a blue badge, are different: that white is the letters themselves, so keep it.

Type a word, or make a monogram

You don’t need a picture of the letters. Choose Word or monogram (in the Artwork box, or on the empty hoop) and the site draws them for you.

• A word is one or two lines in your choice of eleven fonts, in any thread color, with an optional outline in a second color. The picture you see is exactly what gets converted.
• A monogram takes one to five letters. Side by side suits any number. Classic is for three initials, typed first, middle, last: it puts the last one big in the middle. Overlapping is for two or three letters that cut into one another. Add a round, double-ring, square or diamond frame if you like.
• It then opens like any other picture, with the Lettering image type, so you can still change the size, hoop, fabric and thread colors. Bold fonts such as Anton, Poppins Bold, Lilita One and Alfa Slab One hold up best at small sizes; the script fonts need to be larger.
• The letters are drawn in your browser, and nothing reaches us until you convert them, the same as a picture you upload. A design made this way is priced like an uploaded picture.
• The fonts are free, open-licensed fonts (the SIL Open Font License, and Apache 2.0 for Permanent Marker), hosted on this site. Their licenses are in /fonts/licenses/.

Size limits for lettering

Thread has a thickness, so there’s a limit to how small a letter can be and still read clearly. Lettering that’s too small won’t show up well when it’s digitized. Thin strokes turn into a single line of thread, the gaps inside letters like “e” and “a” fill in, and fine details drop out entirely.

• Rule of thumb: letters shorter than about 5 mm (a little under ¼ inch) are hard to read once stitched, and the thinner the letter, the worse it gets.
• Make it bigger. Raise the Design width until the smallest words look right in the preview. Zoom in to check them, since the preview at 100% can flatter small text.
• Words beside a picture set the size. If a logo has a big picture and small words, the words are what limit how small you can go. Either make the whole design larger, or leave the small words off and add them another way.
• Pick a bold, simple font for anything small. Thin, script and very decorative fonts lose their detail first.
• Lower “Smallest detail” under Fine-tune if letters or their thin strokes are disappearing. It helps a little, but it can’t make thread thinner than it is.
• The Lettering image type fills bold letters solid, which suits larger sizes. On small letters the strokes get thin, and thin strokes are stitched as satin or a single line again.

Script and handwriting fonts

Cursive fonts are mostly thin, curving strokes that swell and thin out, so they need different handling from block letters. Choose Lettering under Image type and the site does it for you:

• Thin strokes become smooth, bold single lines with short stitches that follow the curves, so a small “O” or “R” stays round instead of turning into a many-sided shape.
• Thicker strokes become satin columns, so a script that swells and thins keeps its thick and thin look: satin on the heavy downstrokes, a single line on the fine joins.
• The inside of loops and letters like “a” and “o” is left open, so they don’t fill with a patch of thread.

To get the best result:

• Choose a monoline or medium-weight script (even strokes, not hairline). Very fine hairline scripts can only be stitched as a single line of thread, which is as thin as embroidery gets, and they look faint next to the heavy strokes.
• Give it room. Make the whole word at least about 60–70 mm wide, with capital letters around 10 mm tall or more. Scripts have small loops and tight curves, and they’re the first thing to clog when the lettering is too small.
• Fine-tune under Fine-tune: Thin lines up to sets how thick a stroke can be before it becomes satin instead of a single line (raise it if your script looks ragged), and Thin-line stitch length sets how long the stitches are (shorter follows curves more smoothly; about 1.3 mm suits small script).
• Check the loops by zooming in on the preview. If a loop has filled in, make the design larger or pick a simpler font.

Watch it stitch first

Press the play button under the preview to watch the design sew in order, and drag the slider to jump around. Tick Show jumps to see the travel moves between parts. It’s a quick way to spot long jumps, odd stitching order, or a color you forgot to switch off. The stats show the stitch count, thread colors, size and an estimated sewing time.

Why stitch counts differ

The Stitches number on this site is the number of stitches in the file you’ll download. Your embroidery software or your machine may show a slightly different number for the same design, and that’s normal. It doesn’t change how the design sews.

• Lock stitches. With Lock stitches at every start and trim ticked, a few tiny anchoring stitches are added at each start and trim. They’re counted here, and untick the box to see the count without them. Some programs count them and some don’t.
• Jumps, trims and color changes. Machines often count these moves as stitches too, so the number on your machine’s screen is usually a little higher than the one in your software.
• Long stitches. A stitch longer than a format allows is split into two or more. Each format has its own limit, so the same design can differ by a handful of stitches from one format to another.
• How programs count. Different software and machines each have their own way of counting, so expect a difference of a few dozen stitches on a design of a couple of thousand. The sewing time shown here is an estimate, and real speed depends on your machine.

Pick the right file format

Use the format your machine reads. If you’re unsure, check your manual, or use DST, which is the most widely readable.

We’ve tested our PES files on a real Brother machine. The other formats follow their published specifications but haven’t been tried on every machine, so a test stitch matters even more there. Leave Lock stitches at every start and trim ticked so thread ends don’t pull out.

Designs bigger than your hoop

• Pick your hoop under Hoop and size. If the design is bigger than the hoop, the site can split it into several hoopings, one file per position, with alignment marks so the pieces line up.
• Each file is sewn completely before you re-hoop for the next. The preview plays them in that order.
• Check your machine’s real embroidery area. Many home machines sew only 100 × 100 mm (about 4 × 4 in) even when a bigger hoop fits, and will refuse a larger file. If you see a warning about file sizes, choose the 4 × 4 hoop and let the site split the design.
• With a multi-position hoop that slides along without re-hooping, use My machine’s embroidery area so each file fits your machine’s window. This is newer, so test it on scrap fabric first.

Before you sew

• Always sew a test on scrap of the same fabric and stabilizer as your final piece.
• Match the stabilizer to the fabric. Cutaway suits stretchy fabrics such as knits and T-shirts and dense designs, tearaway suits stable woven fabrics, and a water-soluble topping on towels and fleece stops stitches sinking in. Choosing your fabric on the design page suggests all three.
• Hoop snug and flat, not stretched. Fabric stretched in the hoop springs back and puckers around the design once it’s removed.
• Dense designs pucker more. If a test puckers, open Fine-tune and raise Fill row spacing, or switch to a firmer stabilizer.
• Use the needle and thread your machine’s manual recommends for embroidery.

Describing a design

If you see an “or describe it” box on the design page, you can type a description instead of uploading a picture. To get artwork that stitches well:

• Ask for one simple subject, such as “a smiling cartoon fox”, in flat colors with bold outlines.
• Skip backgrounds, scenery, gradients and tiny details.
• Leave out lettering. AI pictures often garble words, so add text separately.
• Not quite right? Change a few words and generate again. The number of free tries may be limited.

Turning a photo into clip art

A snapshot, such as a pet in a kitchen, rarely stitches well as it is: the light and shadow turn the fur into patches and the room behind it gets in the way. If you see Convert to Clip Art (AI) next to Choose image, it sends your photo to OpenAI, which redraws the main subject as flat-color clip art with a bold outline on plain white. That picture then goes through the normal steps, and it stitches much better than the photo would. The guided setup's quiz points you here on its own when you tell it your photo is of a pet, person, or portrait.

• It’s a new drawing, not a filter. It usually keeps the pose, markings and colors, but it can change details, so compare it with your photo. Back to my photo undoes it.
• Start with a clear photo where the subject fills a good part of the picture, is well lit and is in focus. Busy scenes and several subjects are less predictable.
• Your photo is sent to OpenAI for this, so use only pictures you’re comfortable sending (see the privacy policy). A design made this way is priced as an AI design, and the number of free tries may be limited.
• Not happy with it? Try again, or use Cut out the subject (under Image type) on the original photo instead.

When something looks off

• Gaps or fabric showing through: lower Smallest detail or set Background color to “Stitch everything”, then check the preview zoomed in.
• A white shape behind or inside letters: toggle that thread off in the thread list, or skip it on your machine. See lettering and text.
• Jagged or lumpy edges: use a larger, sharper source image, or raise Edge smoothing.
• Too many stitches or colors: lower Colors, at most, or make the design a little smaller.
• Your machine says the file is too big: see “Designs bigger than your hoop” above.
• Want to begin again? Reset at the top of the design page clears everything.

Make a design