Abstract: An embroidery system having an embroidery machine for automatically stitching embroidery stitch patterns on a garment and a machine controller for selectably controlling the operation of the embroidery machine in response to user provided selections, the improvement involves the use of a Windows CE based graphical user interface, such as a PDA, which is located between the user and the machine controller to provide user selections through the graphical user interface for directing the machine controller. The embroidery system has an associated embroidery functionality and the graphical user interface has a defined system architecture which may selectably enhance the embroidery system functionality by selectably adding software modules to the graphical user interface, such as to control the creation of embroidery lettering, to provide maintenance monitoring either locally or over the Internet, or to enable communication with the embroidery machine over a network.