At the machine

Printing a thread chart for an embroidery design

A twelve-colour design means twelve interruptions. Losing your place in that sequence — with thread everywhere and the machine waiting — is how an evening goes wrong.

What a thread chart is

One sheet of paper, taped up beside the machine, listing every colour stop in the order the machine will ask for it, with a box to tick as each one finishes. That is all it is, and it is the single most useful piece of paper in machine embroidery.

What belongs on it

• The design's name, so a stack of charts stays sorted.
• Size, stitch count and colour-stop count, so you can confirm you printed the right one.
• A picture of the design, large enough to recognise across a room.
• The hoop it fits and the estimated thread.
• Every stop, numbered, in order, with a colour swatch, the thread name if the file carried one, its stitch count — and a tick box.

Why paper beats a phone here

A phone screen sleeps, needs clean hands, and cannot be scribbled on. A sheet of paper takes the thread number you actually substituted, survives being sat on, and is still there next time you stitch the same design.

About the thread names

Printing one

In Hoopside, open the design and tap the chart button: it lays the design, its figures and the full colour-stop table with tick boxes onto A4 and saves it as a PDF you can print or email. Designs with more than a dozen stops continue onto a second page with the column headings repeated, so a chart never ends mid-table.

Why colour stops are numbered

The machine does not know what colour anything is. It knows to stop, and it knows how many times it has stopped. So the only reliable way to follow a multi-colour design is by stop number — first stop, second stop, third — and any chart that is useful at the machine is organised that way.

This is also why a chart beats the design's picture. The picture tells you what it will look like; the numbered list tells you what to do next, which is the question you actually have with the machine waiting.

Filling it in as you go

The tick box does more than mark progress. Written next to each stop, the thread you really used — not the one the file suggested — turns the chart into a record. Stitch the same design in six months and you are not guessing at your own substitutions.

It also survives an interruption. Stopping at stop 7 of 12 is completely safe if stop 7 is ticked, and quietly ruinous if you are relying on memory.

What to do when a design has no thread names

Most DST files carry no colour information at all, so the chart will show colour blocks with no names against them. That is the file being honest rather than the software failing.

In that case use the chart the other way round: print it, hold your spools against the swatches, and write your own choices in. You end up with the same document — a numbered running order — built from what you own rather than from what the designer happened to use.

Long designs and second pages

A design with more than a dozen colour stops needs a second sheet. What matters is that the column headings repeat, so page two is readable on its own rather than a list of numbers whose meaning was on the page you left by the machine.

Related

• Stitch count, size and hoop fit: reading a design before you stitch — What the numbers on a design mean, and which ones decide whether it is worth starting.
• How to open a DST file on Android — Why DST is everywhere, how to view one on a phone, and why it never shows the right thread colours.
• Do you need to digitize? What each kind of embroidery software actually does — Viewer, converter, digitizer — three different tools, and the one you need depends on what you have.

Print a chart for your next design

Hoopside converts a design to DST, PES, JEF, VP3, EXP or XXX, re-encoding the stitches for the format you pick rather than just renaming the file. Viewing every design is free; converting is a one-time unlock.