After you’ve downloaded and unzipped embroidery designs, you can transfer them to your embroidery machine and start stitching.
First, save the design onto the media your embroidery machine reads. For most machines this will be a USB stick. To do this:
- Insert the USB drive: Plug the USB drive into an available USB port on your computer
- Find the design file: Locate the embroidery design file you want to transfer on your computer. Right-click on the file to open the action menu.
- Send the file to the USB drive: From the action menu, select "Send to", then choose your USB drive from the list of options.
- Eject the USB drive: After the file has been copied, safely eject the USB drive from your computer.
- Transfer to embroidery machine: Insert the USB drive into the USB port on your embroidery machine.
Some older embroidery machines use other media, such as a memory card or floppy disk, and may require software to save the design onto the media.
Some newer embroidery machines can also transfer designs via an app. Refer to your machine’s manual or help file for details.
If the design isn’t transferring to the machine
If you’ve transferred a design to your embroidery machine but it’s not showing up, here are a few things to check:
- Is the design size compatible with your machine’s embroidery area?
- Is the design format compatible with your embroidery machine?
- Is the design file unzipped?
- Is the design in the correct folder? Some embroidery machines, such as Janome, require designs to be placed in a certain folder within the USB drive.
- Is the USB drive too large? Some embroidery machines won’t read a USB drive with a capacity larger than 2GB.
- Are there too many files on the USB drive? Some machines may only recognize the first 100 files. Try removing all designs other than the one you want to stitch.
- Are there special characters in the design filename? If you’ve changed the filename something that includes special characters such as %($#@^&*, or if you deleted the file extension, then your machine may not be able to read or display the design.
If you’ve checked these things and you’re still having trouble transferring a design to your embroidery machine, send us a message with details—we’ll be glad to help!
