Needle Works

A viewer for Brother PES embroidery designs on the Mac.

Needle Works opens PES files and shows the stitches in their thread colors. It can print them, and it adds Quick Look previews and thumbnails for PES files in the Finder. It needs macOS 12 or later.

Stitch styles

Each window can show the stitches in one of three styles.

The flower's petals drawn as thin lines — **Plain**: lines in each thread's color, of a width you choose, as they're printed.

The petals drawn as shaded thread — **Shaded**: thread at its real width of 0.4 mm, lit from the top left.

The petals drawn as realistic twisted thread — **Realistic**: shaded thread with its twist and natural variation.

Fabrics

Designs are shown on a woven fabric at its real scale: white, natural, khaki, heather gray, red, forest green, chambray, denim, navy or black, or a plain weave in any color. The texture can be turned off to show a flat color.

A leaf on heather gray fabric — Heather Gray

In the Finder

PES files get thumbnails in the Finder, and a preview when you press the Space bar.

Thumbnail of the Needle Works design — Needle Works.pes

Thumbnail of the peace sign design — Peace.pes

Thumbnail of the flower design — Flower.pes

Also

Jump stitches and trims can be shown or hidden.
The fabric, stitch style and other choices made for a design are remembered for the next time it's opened. Design files are never changed.
Designs print at actual size, with a line to check the scale with a ruler, or scaled to fit the page, with a legend of the threads in sewing order.
The Design Information panel shows a design's size, stitch count, colors and color changes.

Installing

Download the zip, unzip it, and drag Needle Works to your Applications folder.
Needle Works isn't notarized by Apple, so the first time you open it, macOS says it can't be opened. Click Done.
Open System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Needle Works, and click Open Anyway.

After that, it opens normally.