I missed so much the capability to see the designs at a glance that I seriously considered shelling out the big $$$ to purchase a newer license, but then I remembered the difficulty to use it, I realized I will never design my own embroidery – much cheaper and faster to buy, so I came to my senses. That version of Embird no longer worked when I upgraded my computers, and I needed a replacement. You need a PhD degree in Embird to use it! But its add-on module “Iconizer” was what I liked most, because it allowed me to see at a glance the contents of an embroidery file, without opening the file. I bought an older version, without the option to upgrade, and I remember that even in its simple version from 15+ years ago I found it baffling. No matter how you start, in time you will end up with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of designs and of course finding the right one for a project will be a big issue.Įmbird was expensive its initial price plus its add-on modules were a good 5 or 6 hundred dollars.

I have seen on eBay offers for USB sticks with 260,000 designs (yes, two hundred sixty thousand!), or you can buy individual designs as needed from specialized companies for a couple of dollars. Some time ago I talked to my friends in our sewing group in Naples, FL about this program, and every single one of them had difficulties believing me: how can one sell for $20 that which, if you buy from Brother, sells (PE Design) for well over $1000? But as I said: there IS such a thing as cheap embroidery software. I remember using an early version of Embird, and the main usage I got out of that program was to SEE what designs are on the disk. When I started in embroidery, many, many years ago, there were very few commercial programs and those had limited features.

Digitize with pe-design 10