DSTTajima →PESBrother, Baby Lock
Convert DST to PES
Most designs sold as a single file are sold as DST, because a DST will feed almost any machine ever built. What it will not do is tell your Brother what colour anything should be — that information does not exist in the file. So the conversion itself is the easy half: every stitch crosses over untouched. The half worth reading about is what arrives at the machine, and what to check before you hoop anything.
Stitch preview
DST FILE PREVIEW · SAMPLE DESIGN Showing a realistic stitch-out sample — choose or drop your own file.
Sampler · Roundel
Stitches—
Threads—
Width—
Height—
Jumps—
Avg. density—
Thread order
Hoop fit
The two formats
.DST · TAJIMA
Tajima DST
Written for Tajima commercial machines and read by nearly everything since. It stores stitch movements only — no thread colours at all, which is why a palette is assigned rather than read.
.PES · BROTHER, BABY LOCK
Brother PES
Brother's own format, used across Baby Lock and Bernina Deco machines. It carries thread colours and a design thumbnail, so a converted file arrives with its palette already set.
What to watch for
The stitches are safe; the colours were never there
A DST records needle movement and nothing else — no thread numbers, no colour names, not even a count of how many colours the design was meant to use. What it does record is where the machine should stop and wait for you to change thread. We read those stops, treat each run between them as a block, and give each block a colour so you can tell them apart on screen. That palette is ours, not the designer's. Because PES does store colours, our palette gets written into the file you download — which is better than nothing, but it is a placeholder. Set the real threads at the machine.
We write PES version 1, on purpose
Brother has revised PES many times; files in the wild carry version headers from #PES0001 up to #PES0060, and an older machine confronted with a newer version will refuse the file outright. We write #PES0001, the original. It is the least sophisticated version and the one every Brother and Baby Lock machine since the PE-300 can open. If your machine is recent you lose nothing by this; if it is old, this is the difference between the design loading and not.
Check the size against your hoop before you stitch, not after
The hoop table above measures the design itself. Machines are less generous: they compare the design against the hoop currently selected and refuse anything that overflows, and a design that measures exactly 100 mm will not reliably go into a 100 mm hoop. Leave yourself about 10 mm. If the machine calls a design too big when the numbers say it fits, the usual culprit is the hoop the machine thinks is attached, not the file.
Related conversions
Your file is used only for this conversion and deleted as soon as the download is ready. We keep no copy, and there is no account to store it in.