Silhouette Studio® Designer Edition Plus enables you to import most major embroidery file types like PES, DST, EXP, JEF, and XXX. Silhouette Studio® cannot SAVE these file types. Once you’ve opened these designs in Silhouette Studio®, you can have your Silhouette machine cut your appliqué from fabric or you can use embroidery lines to create sketch designs.

Click Open and navigate to the file where it’s saved on your computer. You may need to change your file type. We are going to choose a JEF file.

When this appliqué design opens, there are multiple layers. We only need to cut a simple line for each piece of the appliqué, so we’ll drag away everything except the placement stitch. There’s an identical line for the tack-down stitch, so make sure you’re only cutting one of those shapes.

You can delete all these extra embroidery pieces, and now you’re ready to prepare your fabric with stabilizer and cut these shapes with your fabric blade!

There’s another fun thing you can do with embroidery lines once you’ve imported an embroidery file into Silhouette Studio®. You can use the embroidery lines as a cut file to create colorful sketch designs.

Let’s open the PES file, change the file type, and grab the design.

In this example, we’ve opened a leaf embroidery design, which is not an appliqué design. If we zoom in, you can see it’s got some fun lines that will be great for a sketch pen to draw.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial on what you can do with imported embroidery file types in Silhouette Studio® Designer Edition Plus and higher.