The cutting needle does not need to be oriented in any particular rotational position, and is shorter than a sewing needle, as it only needs to penetrate the material, and not interact with the rotary hook/bobbin. The cutting needles come in packs of two, and can last for hundreds of cuts.

To create your cut line, digitize a bean stitch with a stitch length of between 0.3 and 0.4mm around the satin stitch of your patch, or in the shape of the appliques to be cut, and assign that as the last colour of the design. Program your machine to use the needle position where the knife is located to “sew” that bean stitch, and it will cut your material. Once the patch is cut free, lift it away, and clean up the frayed edge of material with a heat gun, lighter, or other source of heat.

Note: You will need to disable thread detection while the cutting needle is in operation to prevent your machine from stopping repeatedly for false thread/bobbin detections. If your machine has a short stitch filter, it will also need to be disabled to ensure that the short cutting stitch length is maintained.

If you own Melco Amaya or EMT16 machines, here is a step-by step guide to setting up a design to run on a cutting needle:

Before loading the design to the machine, in Melco OS/Amaya OS, Click on tools–>design filter, and change the short stitch length to 0. Make a note of what the original value was, so that you can change it back after using the cutting needle.

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Install the cutting needle in the position of your choice. Remove the thread from that position. In our example, we use needle 1.

Load the design, and set your colour sequence. Choose the needle position where the cutter is installed for the colour change dedicated to the cut line.

Click on "Settings By Colour", then:
(1)Check the “Settings By Color” box.
(2)Click on the colour block associated with the cut line.
(3)Uncheck “Enable All Thread Detection”

This will ensure that thread detection is turned on for every part of the design except the cut line.