Hi, I’m new to embroidery meaning my wife picked me up a machine for $70 and now I find it fascinating and want to get more out of this machine in the way of patterns. This is where the brakes come on. This machine has no USB port and relies on memory cards for more patterns, availability of cards is limited. Is there a way I can get blank cards and write to them so I have more pattern choices?
I was hoping @John_Marlow (really Chris) would jump on this thread. We’ve got a Babylock, and there’s a program that’s on the computer in Creative Arts that lets us load files onto its’ cards. The name of that program? I don’t remember. There was a fancy gizmo that you put the card into that had a USB thing so it could talk to the computer. For the Babylock, I vaguely remember that you could buy patterns from Embroiderydesigns.com, and load them via that program onto the memory cards. How that relates to your Simplicity machine is a very good question.
I’ve never seen your machine, but I’m going to make some educated guesses.
- Your machine will embroider a 4x4 image.
- It requires files in the .PES format.
- It most likely uses a proprietary card format, and it appears to be just like the one our Babylock uses.
Once you have a rewritable card, you can transfer designs to your machine. In CA we use a program called PED-Basic, which is nothing more than file transfer software; and we have a piece of hardware that reads those funky little cards.
If you have a preprogrammed card that you’re not fond of, you might see if it has a lock switch that you can unlock and write to it. If so, that’s likely to be cheaper than buying the rewritable card.
I use EmbroideryDesigns.com a lot. They have some free designs, and many that are very reasonably priced. You have to specify that you need .PES format, but that’s a common format so it shouldn’t be an issue.
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