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Introduction

Computer-controlled embroidery machines allows you to do computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) with thread.
20% of today's jobs are IT-intensive, meaning that people use complex software. Most kids don't know how to use professional software on a computer. Most specialize in digitalized bronze age social practices (chatting and trading artifacts). Computerized embroidery could be an interesting entry point for learning how to deal with complex software, analyzing a problem, etc. and at the end there are tangible results that could be further used as we already argued. For example, learners could express their own ideas through embroidery instead of getting hooked to expensive brands.

Modern embroidery design often starts from "ordinary" vector graphics and before actual stitches are generated, so-called embroidery objects are also represented as vector graphic objects. We found that most of our students entering our master's program in educational technology are not familiar with technical drawing, i.e. people feel lost in more complex programs such as Flash Professional or InkScape. Not being able to create or at least to manipulate technical drawings is a handicap that will make learning any multimedia, gaming designn or CAD/CAM program much more difficult. We feel that embroidery is nice way to start learning vector graphics since learners will produce tangible and (hopefully) movitating artifacts.

...Having students create designs will train them in design and in using design software. Design is important for our societies and should be taught more... In the UK, Embroidery and Cad/Cam is now a part of the curriculum since 2000.
From Computerized embroidery in education by Daniel K. Schneider




Embird Embroidery Software sells several programs, A base program (Basic Embird) plus several plugins e.g. Embird Studio (digitizing). Can read/write many formats and supports many machine types. It comes in several components, e.g.: Basic Embird Embroidery Software (basic editing, sizing, stitch editing, etc.). This $144 program must be acquired for other modules to run.
Studio (digitizing, lettering, auto-tracing, freehand, conversion of vector files into embroidery) is $150 + $90 = $240.
Font engine, $145

There is an Embroidery output extension for Inkscape

You'll need to install Shapely
Also:
  1. Open a new Finder window and browse to the directory where you installed Inkscape to (most likely '/Applications').
  2. select 'Inkscape', open the context menu (with the right mouse button or 'Ctrl+mouse button' for single-button mouse or 'Ctrl+tap' with the trackpad) and choose the entry 'Show Package Contents'
  3. within the package contents, browse to 'Contents > Resources > bin'
  4. in 'Contents > Resources > bin' open the file 'inkscape' in a plain-text editor (use drag&drop for example, or 'Open with…' from the context menu)
  5. once you have the file (a shell script) open in the text editor, go to line 32. The content of line 32 is: 
    export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes
  6. above line 32, insert a new line with this text: 
    export VERSIONER_PYTHON_VERSION=2.6
  7. save the changes (make sure that no (hidden) file extension is added)
  8. test Inkscape
The extension can be found in Render.