Cut, combine & convert — Knife, Punch, Contour, Border, Join, Merge, Convert

These live in the action grid you see once an object or group is selected (see Select & transform).

What does Knife do?

Splits a Run, Satin or Fill into two separate objects along a line you draw across it — the machine equivalent of cutting a shape in half with scissors, but done before stitching, so you get two independently editable objects afterward.

On a satin column the cut keeps the angle you drew. The knife cuts both edges of the column where your line crosses them, so the new end runs along your line rather than square across the column. That is what lets you build a sharp corner by hand: cut two columns at matching angles and butt the two cut faces together, the way a picture frame is mitred. The rest of the column is untouched — only the end you cut changes.

The cut end keeps its angle through everything that follows: Simplify nodes, the width slider, and Merge. In the node editor that angle appears as a purple grip beside the node, and you can drag it to re-aim the stitches at that end.

What does Punch do?

Uses the selected object as a stencil, stamping its shape as a cut-out (“knockout”) into whatever fill objects sit underneath it, so those fills stitch around the punched shape instead of solidly covering it. Options include an offset (shrink or grow the stencil slightly before punching) and whether the punching object itself remains after the punch or is consumed by it; it also works across a multi-object selection or a whole group at once.

What does Border do?

Adds an outline around the selected shape, with a choice of offset position: On edge, Outside, or Inside — useful for giving a fill a clean satin edge, or for Fit under border to have something to snap to.

It works on a group as well as a single shape, and that is where it earns its name: filled lettering with a satin outline is one tap on the whole word — every letter and every hole (the inside of an a, both holes of a B) gets its ring, in the thread you choose, sewn after the letters so it lands on top of them.

Around live text the outline stays live with it. Retype the word, change the face or the size, bend the baseline, and the outline is made again from the letters that are there now — the word and its edge cannot drift apart. Editing the outline objects by hand is possible, but the next change to the text replaces them, so make the word right first and dress it afterwards. An outline in the letters’ own colour needs no separate objects at all: use Satin edge in the group’s Tatami section instead.

What does Contour do?

Draws a line at a distance you set around the selection — an echo line, a margin, an outline around lettering. It offsets areas, so it works on a Fill, on a Satin column (the band between its rails is an area, so an open stroke is fine), and on a Run whose stroke closes into a ring. An open line has no inside and cannot have a contour; the panel says so instead of quietly leaving it out.

The panel gives you the distance (2.0 mm by default, drag the slider or tap the number and type it), Outside / Inside / Both, how many lines (up to five, evenly spaced), and the Stitch to sew them with — Run or Satin first, then that kind’s presets. A dashed preview on the canvas follows the slider, so you see where the line lands before it exists.

Shapes that touch are always contoured together — two overlapping letters never get a line through their own seam. What separate shapes mean is a question geometry cannot answer, so the panel asks it whenever the selection covers more than one area:

• Per shape — a line around each one. The edge of every part: echo lines, a border on each letter.
• Around all — one line around the lot. Gaps are bridged with a soft fillet that follows the shapes rather than cutting the bay between them off, and what lies between the parts stays inside. This is the outline of a patch, the placement line of an appliqué.

Around all is preselected for a multi-selection, because that is usually what selecting several things and asking for a contour means. In Per shape, the panel says how the merging worked out — “7 shapes make 4 areas here” — so three lines out of four selected shapes reads as arithmetic rather than caprice. Parts that lie far apart get a fuller belly between them — the dashed preview shows it before anything is created.

The distance is measured from the edge of the shape, and every line steps off the original, so three lines at 2 mm sit at 2, 4 and 6 mm. In Per shape, holes come along at the same distance from the material — the hole of an “o” gets its own line; in Around all they do not, since the point of that mode is the outside.

Corners decides what happens where the line turns a sharp corner. Going outward, only the inward corners are sharp — the V between two petals, the waist a bridge leaves between two parts; the outward ones come back as arcs of the distance itself, so the line already rounds a leaf tip on its own. As drawn leaves the sharp ones sharp, the way it always has. Rounded fills them with an arc, and a Corner radius slider (1–10 mm, starting at 3) sets how wide. A notch narrower than twice the radius closes over completely — and if that swallows a line, say the one inside a small hole, the panel says so rather than quietly handing you one line fewer. In Per shape the rounding works on each shape by itself, so a wide radius can never weld two contours into one. Going inside it is the mirror image, the outward corners being the sharp ones there. Either way the rounding only ever moves the line away from the material, so the distance you set stays a minimum and never becomes an average. The dashed preview follows both, so you see the answer before you commit.

The result is ordinary objects, inserted right behind their source in the same color. They do not follow the shape if you edit it later — reshape the source, then contour again.

Contour and Border overlap: Border is the fill-only classic (on the edge, or half the border’s width outside/inside, holes included), Contour is the general tool with a free distance, several lines and any closed object.

What does Join do?

Makes several objects sew in one go — while every one of them stays its own object, editable and reversible (ungroup and everything is as before). It is the same action wherever you find it: on a loose multi-selection (which groups the objects first) and on a group you already made, and it works for every stitch kind — satin columns, lines, fills.

Join does two things. First it puts the members into the one sew order a branched figure wants: touching satin columns (a T, a Y, a star — most lettering) sort so that each cover lands over what came before; lines sort into a single pass; fills keep your drawn order. Second, it treats the stretches between the members as connectors under one rule: where the thread has to come back, it runs hidden under a piece stitched later or doubled along a line it retraces — never across bare fabric — and where nothing will ever cover it, it is cut instead. The layer row reports what actually came out, measured from the stitch plan: Joined · 3 × Satin · 2 hidden travels.

Two things stay in your hands afterwards:

• Entry and exit of each member remain the draggable green handles they always were. Left alone, each piece starts at whichever of its ends is nearest to where the previous piece finished, so the thread has the shortest possible way to go. Dragging a handle overrides that.
• Hide travels, the switch on the joined group, off: Cut instead. Turned off, the group ties off and cuts the thread after every member — some prefer the extra stops to any doubled thread. The default for new joins sits in Project settings next to the trim rule, and changing it there re-applies to the joined groups already in the project; each group can still decide for itself afterwards.

A joined group is marked with a green link icon in the Layers panel so it’s visually obvious later which objects are actually one unit. And this needs no re-doing: groups joined in earlier versions get the improved connectors automatically the next time the project generates its stitches.

What does Merge do?

Join’s destructive sibling: out of the members it makes one object, and the parts are gone — no ungroup brings them back (undo does). What it produces depends on the stitch kind:

• Fill — a genuine union of the shapes. Holes are preserved; parts that do not overlap stay grouped.
• Running stitch — one continuous path. Touching or crossing lines become a single pass with minimal doubling.
• Satin columns that form a chain — one column. Their rungs are carried over exactly as drawn, so a cut end keeps its angle and a pressure-drawn width profile survives. Satin that branches refuses to merge — a T or a star has no single centreline, and welding one through it would lay a bold satin band across the motif. That case is exactly what Join is for, and the message says so.

For the chain case, ends that sit slightly apart are pulled together — the tolerance grows with the column, from 1.5 mm on a narrow one up to 3 mm on a wide one, and both sides share the correction so neither column is dragged on its own. Ends further apart than that are left exactly where you drew them and the message says so; that is not a hand-drawing inaccuracy any more, and closing it silently would move stitches you placed on purpose.

Where two ends meet at an angle, Merge builds a real corner: both edges run on to where they cross, so the point lands where you drew it. The rung spanning that turn is the mitre line — and the two columns are sawn on it, the way a picture frame is made, each arm keeping its own stitch direction right up to the cut. Left as one long rung it becomes a funnel: every stitch near the turn aims into that single line and the thread piles up, on an 8 mm column at a right angle about three times as much thread in the corner as anywhere else. Sawn, the corner carries what the rest of the column carries, the outer point does not move, and no cover is lost. Where the rungs cannot reach the mitre line — a hand-drawn column whose stitches lie at an angle to the turn — the corner keeps its long rung instead, because sawing there would leave the wedge behind it bare.

What does Convert do?

Changes an object’s underlying stitch kind — Run ↔ Satin ↔ Fill — via a matrix of what’s allowed to convert into what (not every combination is meaningful, so some paths are gated with an explanation rather than silently failing). Converting text to a path uses the letter as the geometric unit, and converting a shape with an interior cut-out preserves it as a proper hole ring rather than flattening it away.

What does “Overlaps” (Remove Overlaps) do?

Hides stitches that end up completely hidden underneath objects stitched later, so the machine doesn’t waste time and thread stitching a layer nobody will ever see. It reports how much it took — a trim that ate most of an object usually means the layer order is wrong, not that you saved a lot of thread.

It works on a fill and, since the appliqué work, on a satin column as well: a border running under a later piece is the same question. The two are cut differently, though. A fill simply loses the covered area. A column can’t have a notch bitten out of its side, so the covered stretch is cut out end to end and what remains comes back as separate columns, numbered after the original; a column that is covered along its whole length is deleted outright. Columns in the same group never trim each other, so the pieces of one appliqué letter stay intact.

An appliqué cover is a special case in the other direction: what covers the layer beneath it is not just the 2 mm satin band but the piece of cloth inside it, so everything under that letter is hidden, not only what runs under its edge.

Select exactly one object — there is no group or multi-selection version. If nothing later covers it, you get told so rather than a silent no-op.

It does not trim flush to the covering object’s edge: it leaves a margin tucked underneath, because the two edges pull apart slightly on fabric and a gap would open along the seam. How wide that margin is comes from Overlap under covers in Project settings — soft, stretchy cloth wants more of it.

This one edits the object’s shape, so it is not a display setting you can flip back and forth: changing the margin afterwards does not re-cut what was already cut. Undo and run it again.

What does “Fit under border” do?

Snaps a fill’s edge to sit just inside a matching closed satin border drawn over it, so the fill doesn’t peek out past the border or leave a visible gap — this is the manual trigger for the same behavior the app-wide assistant can also do automatically.