You own a design you love. You want to put a name under it, or drop a monogram into the middle of it, or run two designs together on one hoop.
In most setups that means opening one program to look at the design, another to add the lettering, exporting, re-importing, and hoping the two halves line up. Or it means stitching one, unhooping, re-hooping and stitching the other — and living with whatever alignment you get.
Merging is just putting two things on one artboard
In Unzip2Stitch you open a design, add a second one beside it, and arrange them together on a single artboard. Move them, align them, center them, resize them. When you save, it is one file — one hooping, one run.
The same is true of lettering. Add text to a design you bought and it becomes part of the same file, not a second job.
What you can merge
- A purchased design plus a name or monogram
- Two purchased designs into one layout — a row of three pumpkins, a stacked scene
- A design plus your own lettering on a curve
- Several small designs arranged to fill one hoop, so you stitch once instead of four times
The part that saves the garment
Merging is not really about convenience. It is about alignment.
Two separate stitch-outs means two hoopings, and two hoopings on the same garment is where things go crooked. Fabric shifts. The second design sits a few millimeters off. On a sweatshirt front, a few millimeters is visible forever.
Merged into one file, everything is placed once, on screen, where you can see it — and stitched in one pass.
Check it before you stitch it
Once the pieces are together you can confirm the whole thing fits your hoop, match the threads to a real brand so the screen matches the machine, preview the stitch-out, and print it at true size to lay on the fabric before you commit.
Then save it in your format
Export the merged file in whatever your machine reads — PES, DST, JEF, EXP, VP3, XXX, U01 — sized to the hoop and ready to sew.
If you are adding lettering
The lettering side is worth reading on its own, because embroidery fonts are stranger than people expect. Type with the embroidery fonts you already own →
Runs natively on Mac and Windows. Buy it once. Own it forever.
You are not buying from a stranger
I am Lorna. For eight years I have answered embroidery questions every day in Embroidery for Beginners, my Facebook group of more than 50,000 members. Unzip2Stitch was built out of what I watched people there struggle with.
My name is on the digitizing, on the software and on that group. If something goes wrong, you know exactly where to find me — and so do fifty thousand other embroiderers.