Get artwork a digitiser can actually stitch.
Upload a logo or image. Get flat, clean vector shapes — the input embroidery digitising needs.
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Real vector craft — see for yourself
Your trace lands as genuine, editable SVG paths — the same clean vector work behind Clearly’s bee-ecosystem murals. Infinitely scalable, every path editable, ready for Cricut, print or the web. No embedded pixels, no tangled auto-trace mess.
Hand-authored on the Clearly canvas · editable SVG, not raster.
A vector file is not stitches — it is the thing a digitiser stitches from
Embroidery machines run DST, PES or EXP: files that describe needle positions, stitch types and thread changes. No machine reads an SVG. What a vector gets you is the clean, flat, unambiguous artwork that digitising starts from — and that is genuinely most of the battle, because a digitiser working from a blurry JPEG is guessing at your edges and charging you for the guess. The constraint that surprises people is scale rather than shape: thread has physical width, so detail that reads fine on screen simply cannot exist in stitches.
What a embroidery machine needs from the file
- Minimum feature
- ≈1.5 mm. Below that, stitches will not hold and thread pulls out.
- Minimum text height
- ≈5 mm for legible lettering. Smaller becomes a blur.
- Gradients
- Impossible. Thread is one flat colour — blends become hard bands.
- Colour count
- Every colour is a thread change and a machine stop. Fewer is cheaper.
- Pull compensation
- Fabric distorts under stitch tension; expect ≈0.2 mm of shift.
- Deliverable
- Vector for digitising. The machine file (DST/PES) comes after.
How it works
The cleanest copy you have. A screenshot of a website logo is the worst case.
The trace produces solid regions. Drop any colour that exists only as a gradient step.
Give them the SVG plus the finished size. Size determines what detail survives.
Free watermarked preview. $10 unlocks the clean, exclusive commercial file — emailed, no account, no subscription.
FAQ
No — those are stitch files, produced by digitising software with decisions about stitch type, direction, density and underlay. What this produces is the clean vector artwork that digitising works from, which is what most digitisers ask for first.
Thread has width. Anything under roughly 1.5 mm cannot be formed as a stitch that stays in the fabric, and text under about 5 mm stops being readable. The usual fix is a simplified version of the mark for small applications — most brands with embroidered uniforms have one.
Financially, a lot. Each colour is a thread change, which stops the machine and adds handling. A four-colour logo is meaningfully more expensive per unit than a two-colour one, especially in small runs.
No. Thread is a flat colour. A gradient has to be reinterpreted as bands of solid colour, and that decision is better made deliberately at the artwork stage than left to the digitiser.