Tools
The tools sit in a rail down the left edge of the editor, grouped into Utilities, Editor, Lettering, and Automation. Hover any tool to read what it does; the selected tool is highlighted. See The workspace for how the rail fits with everything else.
A tool with a "+" has variants you reach by right-click or long-press.
The keys below are the default Illustrator preset. You can change them or switch presets in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, and the rail always shows each tool's current key. See Customizing shortcuts.
Utilities
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Select | V | Click or drag a marquee to pick objects. Shift adds, Alt subtracts. |
| Lasso select | Q | Draw a freehand boundary to pick everything inside it. |
| Color select | C | Click a color to select every object that shares it. |
| Pan | H | Drag to scroll the canvas. Hold Space to pan with any tool. |
| Ruler | Backslash | Drag to drop a measured guide line (distance and angle). Its variants (Rectangle guide, Ellipse guide) draw dashed outlines. See Guides. |
| Cutter | K | Select a shape or a path, then drag a line across it to split it into separate pieces. Hold Shift to snap the cut to horizontal, vertical, or 45°. |
Editor
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Individual Stitch | S | Click to place stitches one at a time. Builds a stitch block. |
| Pen | P | Click to drop anchors, drag to shape curves. Double-click to finish. |
| Freehand | N | Drag to draw a path by hand. Draw as many strokes as you like, then commit them as one object. See Freehand drawing. |
| Satin column | Draw a column of satin stitches between two parallel rails. | |
| Rectangle | M | Drag to draw a rectangle. Hold Shift to constrain to a square. |
| Ellipse | L | Drag to draw an ellipse. Hold Shift for a circle. |
| Polygon | Y | Drag to draw a regular polygon. Sides set in the Properties panel. |
| Star | Drag to draw a star. Points and inner radius set in the Properties panel. | |
| Add shape | Opens the shape library, with a live preview of the real stitches. See Add a shape. | |
| New pixel art | Makes a blank 16×16 sprite and opens the pixel editor on it. See Create pixel art. |
Lettering
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Text | T | Add text using digitized fonts. Type in the dialog, placed centered on the hoop. Double-click text to edit it. See Add text. |
| Lettering | Opens your font library, where you edit a font's stitch design. See Edit a font. | |
| Import font | Bring in your own .ttf or .otf and digitize it. See Import a font. |
Lettering and Import font are rail-only: they have no keyboard shortcut, and don't appear in the menus or the command palette. New pixel art has no shortcut either, but it is in the Tools menu and the command palette.
Automation
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Import | Opens a chooser: Reference image, Embroidery design, or Vector graphics (SVG, PDF, or PDF-compatible Adobe Illustrator .ai). |
| Auto-digitize | Opens a chooser: Photostitch (a photo), Cross-stitch (pixel art), or Auto-Trace (a logo or flat clip art). |
Cut a shape in two
The Cutter (K) splits shapes along a line you draw.
- Select the shape or shapes first. The cut only affects what's selected, so you can drag a line straight across a crowded design and touch nothing else.
- Drag a line across the selection. Hold Shift to constrain the cut to horizontal, vertical, or 45°; hold Ctrl/Cmd to snap its endpoints. Press Esc to cancel mid-drag.
- Release. The pieces become the new selection, and the Cutter stays active so you can keep cutting. A cut across several shapes at once is a single undo.
You don't need to drag all the way across a filled shape: the cut line is extended past its edges for you. What the Cutter can cut:
- Vector shapes (fills, rectangles, ellipses, imported paths) split into separate regions.
- Open paths (a pen or freehand curve) split wherever the knife crosses them, into as many pieces as there are crossings. Cross a curve twice and you get three pieces.
- Satin columns are divided across their width into shorter columns, each still a proper satin column. Cutting a closed (ring) column once opens it rather than splitting it in two. Here the line is used exactly as drawn, so stopping partway means "cut straight across from here".
- Text splits by letter: cutting "Hello World" between the words gives "Hello" and "World", both still real, still-digitized text. A letter is never cut through the middle.
- Stitch blocks can't be cut, and locked objects are skipped.
If the line misses, Boldbobbin says so: "The cut line didn't cross a selected shape. Select a shape and drag a line across it."
The Cutter is in the tool rail (and in the glyph editor), but not in the Tools menu.
Freehand drawing
The Freehand tool (N) draws by hand, and a drawing can be made of several strokes. Each drag adds a stroke to a draft; nothing is committed until you say so, so you can build a shape up in passes:
- Start a stroke near the end of the last one and the two weld into one smooth node, as if you never lifted the pen. Start further away and Boldbobbin bridges the gap with a curve that follows both ends' direction.
- Finish near where you began and the path closes into a loop. An animated ring appears around your first node as you come into range, so you can see the close coming.
A small draft bar sits at the bottom of the canvas while you draw:
| Button | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Green check | Enter | Commit every stroke as one object |
| Orange arrow | Backspace | Drop the most recent whole stroke |
| Red cross | Esc | Discard the whole draft |
Freehand shares its Fill type with the Pen tool: pick either tool with nothing selected and the Properties panel offers a fill for the paths you're about to draw. Changing it for one tool changes it for the other. The choices are Default, Running stitch, Tatami fill, and Satin column.
Default is the factory setting, and it reads what you drew: an open line becomes a satin column, a closed loop becomes a tatami fill. Pick one of the other three to override that and always get the same thing.
Guides
Guides are on-canvas reference marks that never stitch out: use them to measure, frame, and align your work. Three tools in Utilities make them (the Ruler slot; its variants are on the tool's fly-out):
- Ruler (Backslash): drag a measured line, labelled with its length and angle. Hold Shift to snap it to horizontal, vertical, or 45°.
- Rectangle guide / Ellipse guide: drag a dashed outline, labelled with its width × height, for framing or alignment.
Guides are first-class scene objects: they appear in the Layers panel tagged "guide" and, with the Select tool, you can move, resize, rotate, and (for a line) drag its endpoints, just like any object. They're excluded from stitching and from exported files.
Hide a guide the way you hide anything else: with its eye toggle in the Layers panel. (A Guides toggle used to sit in the canvas HUD; it was removed in v1.2.2, because per-object visibility already covered it.)
Edit modes (not tools)
You don't pick these from the rail: you enter them by double-clicking an object with the Select tool:
- Node-edit (double-click a vector, or Edit shape in the action bar): move anchors and handles, change node type, insert/delete anchors, edit satin rungs, and Close curve / Open curve an open or closed path. With no node selected, the panel shows curve-level tools including Smooth curve, which rounds every node into one flowing curve.
- Stitch-edit (double-click a stitch block): select, move, insert, and delete individual stitches, and change a vertex between Stitch, Jump, and Trim.
- The pixel editor (double-click a sprite, or Edit pixel art in the action bar): a full-screen mode with its own tools and its own undo history. See Create pixel art.
Commit with Enter, cancel with Esc.
Floating action bar
When you have a selection (with the Select tool, not in an edit mode), a small action bar appears at the bottom of the canvas. Depending on what's selected, it offers:
- Delete, Duplicate
- Edit shape: enters node-edit on a single selected vector, the same as double-clicking it. (Not shown for text, which opens the text dialog instead.)
- Edit pixel art: opens the pixel editor on a selected sprite.
- Order (send to front / forward / backward / to back)
- Convert to…: single object only. What it offers depends on what you picked. See Convert to below.
- Symmetry (Flip horizontal / Flip vertical)
- Reverse direction: for a single reversible vector
- Center on hoop
- Boolean: Union and Intersection work on two or more selected shapes; Subtract and Exclude need exactly two.
- Join blocks, Group, Auto entry/exit: two or more selected
Align and Combine for a multi-selection live on the essentials bar rather than here.
Convert to
Convert to… turns one object into another kind. It is a one-way trip: the result is a new object, and undo is how you get the old one back.
| Convert to | Available on | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Stitch block | Anything that generates stitches | The stitches, frozen. They stop following the shape. A multi-color object becomes one block per thread. |
| Curve | A parametric shape (rectangle, star, and the like) | The same outline as a plain path, with the shape's knobs removed, so you can node-edit it freely. |
| Satin column | A single open path | The path read as a centreline, widened into a column. |
| Satin columns | A shape filled with inner satin | A folder of real satin columns and running Travel objects, in the order they sew, each one editable. |
| Geometry | Text | One editable letter per glyph. They stop being text. |
| Connected component layers | A pixel sprite | A folder of sprites, one per connected blob of color, each named by its thread and cropped to itself. |