Ink/Stitch

Does it sound like this is something worth introducing her to?

I'd sacrifice some of the million things it can do if it wouldn't crash after closing a project on macos.

I hear so much love for Inkscape but every time I've tried to use it for laser cutting or 2d design I give up and go back to Illustrator. I feel like I'm battling Inkscape to do even the most basic things. I'm a very casual/occasional user (of either program).

I'm happy using Gimp and Blender over Photoshop and Maya/Max for my home use cases but Inkscape is defeating me.

There is a lot of nuance in the angle of the stitch, the type of thread, the patterns in satin fill stitching, underfill amount, etc. And then you need to watch out about the materials your stitching into, making sure things arn't stretched, distorted, or you use the right backing to hold it in place, etc.

Dabble your toes in the plethora of professionally designed stitches, so you can see what they look like. The pre-made designs are just lists of x/y coordinates and stitch/cut commands. Keep in mind that this limits the amount you can size up or size down a design: most software won't add/remove stitches to scale it properly.

Ink/Stitch can get around the resize problem by working with with vector/SVG as the source data, and rendering the stitch plan once you've sized things the way you want. It can also import most of the pre-made stitches (.pes, .vp3, etc) into Inkscape as a manual stitch plan, which is just a path with some flags in the xml, and then you can cut out parts of the stitch, or add additional parts.