Ink/Stitch for beginners

What Ink/Stitch is

Ink/Stitch adds embroidery to Inkscape, the free vector drawing program. You draw or trace shapes in Inkscape, tell Ink/Stitch how to stitch each one, and save the result as PES, DST, JEF, EXP, VP3 or one of many other machine formats. It is free and open source under the GNU GPL version 3, and has install guides for Windows, macOS and Linux.

We know it well because it runs inside BobbinBot: our engine uses Ink/Stitch 3.3.0 to write the stitches of every design. Everything below is what we learned setting it up, with the exact values our engine uses.

The three stitch types

Almost every design is made of three kinds of stitching. Here they are in one small test drawing from our own setup, stitched by Ink/Stitch itself: a 28 mm circle, a satin bar 32 mm long and 6 mm wide, and a 68 mm line.

The whole drawing came to 1,116 stitches, 74 × 51.6 mm, and Ink/Stitch took 3.2 seconds to write it on our computer. The fill has by far the most stitches of the three, so fills are the first place to look when a design is slow to sew or too dense.

Params: where the settings live

Select a shape and open Extensions › Ink/Stitch › Params. One window holds every setting for that shape, with a live simulation next to it, so you see the stitches change as you edit. Our PNG to DST guide has screenshots of this window and walks through a whole design.

For a first design, change only three things: the fill angle, so neighboring fills do not all run the same way; the row spacing, if a fill looks too dense or too thin; and pull compensation on satins, if columns sew narrower than drawn. Ink/Stitch's documentation explains why the last one matters: satin stitches pull the fabric together, so a column sews narrower than you draw it.

The settings our engine uses

These are the values BobbinBot's engine writes into Ink/Stitch for a t-shirt, from engine/bobbinbot/svgdoc.py and config/fabrics.json. They are a reasonable starting point for a knit; other fabrics change the spacing and compensation.

Lettering

Ink/Stitch comes with a library of embroidery fonts, already digitized as satin and fill, under Extensions › Ink/Stitch › Lettering. Each font has its own smallest and largest size. Our engine uses three of them for names, and our guide on how small embroidered text can be shows where each one stops.

A first project

• Install Inkscape, then Ink/Stitch, following Ink/Stitch's install guide for your system.
• Start with a logo of two or three flat colors, not a photo.
• Trace it, delete the picture, and set the real size in millimetres.
• Open Params, keep the defaults, and watch the simulation.
• Save a copy in your machine's format, and keep the SVG for changes.
• Open the file in a viewer to check the size and colors, then sew a test.

Is Ink/Stitch worth learning?

If you will digitize often, yes. It is free, it handles every common format, and it gives you control over every stitch decision, which no automatic tool does. The cost is time: each shape needs a stitch type, a direction and settings, and getting a design to sew cleanly takes test sew-outs.

If you need one file for a logo or a name now, an automatic tool is quicker. BobbinBot runs Ink/Stitch underneath with the settings above and shows you a verdict before you pay. Our guide Can AI digitize embroidery? is honest about where that works and where it does not.