Well, we are nearing the end of a long string (pun unintentional) of posts about stitching. Way back in my first post of this series (Sewing Essentials) on July 2, 2024, I mentioned that stitches, strings & thread can add an additional layer of interest to layouts. I’ve since spent weeks giving you a lot of tips about stitching but have yet to cover string/thread. Today I’m going to do just that.

I know a lot of designers may include string/thread (from now on I’m just going to say string) elements in their kits. But it does seem that there aren’t a lot of standalone string element packs out there. There are some, such as this pack, “Stringin’ Along Vol. 5” by Bekah E Designs:

It’s kind of hard to find free ones but occasionally I’ll run into one such as “Strings Set 5” by Chantahlia Design:

But maybe you don’t already have any string. More importantly you might really want to create your own custom designed string element. Either way, you’re in luck. Today’s post is going to be about how to do just that.

Using drawn lines or doodles and some styles it’s easy to create your very own, unique string…

Strings & Such

You would think one of the easiest ways to create your own string would be by using brushes just as we thought with stitches. Sadly, that’s not the case. I even went out to my trusty Brusheezy and thought I found a set of string brushes but it wasn’t in Photoshop brush (ABR) format ☹

Aside from free brushes I also didn’t have much luck finding string brush sets available for purchase. I did find one, “String Brushes Kit” by Marisa Lerin:

And just as with the stitching brush I found, it’s a simple matter of “stamping” the brush and applying any one of the styles I mentioned in my Sewing Essentials post (such as the String Photoshop Style by Karen Schulz) including the “manual” process I outlined to complete the string.

So, actual string brushes were kind of a bust. But not to worry, hope is not lost. Let’s explore some other options…

Draw Curvy Lines

Just a reminder…I use the current version of Photoshop Elements (PSE – 2024). Some of my screen shots may look different than what you see on your screen depending on the version you are using.

Did you know that in addition to brushes, you can also create a string from a drawn curved line?

As we’re all well aware, there are lots of things full Photoshop does that PSE doesn’t. Sometimes there are work-arounds, sometimes there aren’t. One of those things is curvy lines. But if you have a steady hand you can try to draw your own “curvy” line.

As you know from my “Type A Stitch” post this is often a daunting task for me. I had pretty much given up hope on smooth curved lines. After trying a lot of things that I thought should work – but either failed spectacularly or just didn’t create the look I wanted, I was about to call it quits. Then I found George Peirson, of the HowToGurus.

Not only does he have courses that can be purchased, he also has a massive selection of free tutorials on YouTube. One of which is about Drawing Curved Lines.

Thanks to George, I was finally able to create some curved lines. But it was a bit of work and really wasn’t helping me easily create “squiggly” lines or the curly Qs that l want for bows. And since today I’m talking about exactly those kinds of lines, rather than me spending a lot of time explaining how to achieve them by drawing, I’d encourage you check out George’s tutorial.

In my pursuit of an easier solution to my “problem”, I’ve come to rely on a completely different method…Doodles.

Doodle Brush

And believe it or not, you can actually find some free brushes that might work even though they aren’t “string”. This time Brusheezy came through for me. Just search for doodle brushes and you should find more than a few that can work. Actually, most of the best options tend to show up as “Dividers” rather than doodles but there are also some cute doodles that could be turned into other “stitched” elements.

One set of divider brushes caught my attention recently – “Divider Photoshop Brushes 17”:

If you’ve been following this series, you should now know how to deal with brushes like these. So, I’m not going to go into a lot of that detail again today. Just go back and read about using brushes in my “Sewing Essentials” post.

What I do want to mention is how to deal with doodles that aren’t completely connected as ones you see in the image above. Let’s take a look at this one in particular:

Here’s that doodle “stamped” onto its own layer above my white background layer:

I can just modify it by either erasing the part that appears to be disconnected or by filling in the gap using a standard PSE brush tool. Funny thing is, when I zoomed in very close, I could see that there really isn’t a gap at all:

Even though there really isn’t a break in the line, it’s not really going to look like a “proper” string (in my opinion) unless I fix the “connecting” point. All I have to do is open the Brush tool and select a basic hard round brush. I ensure that my foreground color chip is still set to the color I already used for the brush and just “fill in” until I’m happy with how the “doodle” looks:

That looks better. Now let’s go back to the original doodle. Some other alternatives would be to either “cut” the doodle in half or erase the part to the right that appears not to be connected. Whichever option I choose to use, the first step is to draw a selection box around the part that I’m going to erase or cut apart:

Then I can either press the Delete key to erase that part of the doodle or create a new “Layer Via Cut”:

Then I end up with a completely separate doodle:

And I can now apply a style to complete the “doodle” string. I’ll do that later.

So that covered those brushes. But there’s more…

Doodles & Line Art

Have you ever given thought to using doodle elements for string? That’s right! Just find an image of a doodle that at least gives you a starting point. Once you have that, it’s a whole lot easier to create the kind of look you want for stings & bows.

Short of either actual string or a string brush there are countless other doodles to use. I was able to find some doodles at Creative Fabrica:

Doodle Strings Set One

Doodle Strings Set Two

Each of these sets include individual PNG files for the doodles. So that makes this super easy. Just pull in the desired doodle and apply a style and you have your string.

But what if you want something different? That’s where I just had to think outside the box a bit. There were so many other options available once I started looking at things differently.

And that’s where “line art” enters the picture. I’d like to introduce you to Brusheezy’s “cousin”…Vecteezy. Vecteezy is an online marketplace for vector graphics. Basic features are free but include ads and limitations. Pro subscribers get an advanced and more comprehensive selection of content.

I know…I said I was going to talk about line art and then I said vector graphics. They’re basically the same thing. Most line art we can find online is in the form of SVG or JPG files not PNG files. The most fundamental difference between PNG and SVG is that one is a raster file type and the other is vector. A PNG is a raster – that is, a pixel-based image format.

Okay, you’re probably still confused and I’m sorry if I didn’t help more. The thing you really need to understand is the difference in how we can use these “vector” images versus our PNG images.

Anyway, back to Vecteezy. The reason I said Vecteezy is Brusheezy’s cousin is because you will often see some images from Vecteezy pop up at Brusheezy depending upon your search criteria. Then there’s a “tab” on the Brusheezy page that will take you directly to Vecteezy:

Once you’re on the Vecteezy site all you have to do is search for “lines bows knots string”. A lot of lovely files will pop up. Unfortunately, not all of them are free. But here’s one that is:

Vecteezy Simple Bow Knots

To download this file, you must agree to credit the creator if you use this for anything other than personal use. I assume this could also apply if you are posting your layouts on any public forums. Regardless, it’s free.

When I downloaded and unzipped the file it contained a 1920×1440 JPG file with a resolution of 72 px. I was a bit surprised to see that it wasn’t a higher resolution than that but I can scale it up with no degradation so that’s fine.

I’m going to show you how I work with these JPG files….

Clearly the first thing I do is save the unzipped JPG file somewhere on my hard drive. The next thing I do is to pull this JPG into PSE to resize it:

When the Image Size dialog box pops up, I just set the resolution to 300px and click OK. I don’t save it at this size as there’s no need to take up any more hard drive space than necessary.

Then I draw a selection box around the bow I want to use:

I go to the top tool bar and select Edit->Copy (Ctrl+C) this copies that selection to my system clipboard. Then from the top tool bar I select File->New->Image from Clipboard:

PSE then opens a new file with that bow:

I can now close the Vecteezy file. PSE will ask if I want to save the changes I made and I click “No”. As I said, there’s no reason to save that file at the larger size. But if you’d like, you certainly can save it.

Well, I certainly can’t do much to create string with this JPG but I do save it somewhere on my hard drive (as a precautionary measure). I certainly don’t want to have to go through that whole re-size/copy process if I mess something up and have to start over 😉

After that I can either delete the white background or select the black bow and copy it to a new file as I did with that seemingly disconnected doodle in the section above.

PSE 2024 gives me the ability to select the background:

So that’s the way I’ll quickly delete the background. If you don’t have that option, you can just simply make a selection of the black bow, invert the selection and then delete the background.

Note: Whether you delete the background or select the bow for extraction, be sure to zoom in close so you can ensure that your selection captures the entire bow and none of the white. If you aren’t sure how to make a clean selection, please refer back to my post about Making Selections.

Regardless of the method used to remove the white background, I now have the black bow on a transparent background. The next thing I want to do is double-check the edges of that bow to ensure I’m happy that ALL the white is gone and the edges are relatively smooth.

The easiest way to do this (in my opinion) is to create a new layer under that bow layer and fill it with a very bright, vibrant color. I chose a neon pink (#fb05e7). Then I zoomed in very close:

If I find any areas that need to be adjusted, I just select the Eraser tool and a round brush (I prefer a Hard Round brush) and erase the parts that shouldn’t be there. Conversely, if I find areas where the edges could be “smoothed out” or filled in a bit, I can use the Brush tool and a round brush to add black back into those sections.

I think my bow looks pretty good. So, I can now either hide or delete that pink layer and get back to that transparent background.

Because I merely deleted the white background, I will need to crop this image to size before I save it as a PNG file. If you copied your black bow to a new file, you should just be able to save the now transparent file as a PNG. Here’s my final re-sized file:

With this new PNG file open I can now add a style to the bow:

I did use one of the String Styles by Karen Schulz. I do want to keep the original black bow to use again another time. So, I just save this new bow as a separate PNG:

Now that I’ve completed this process, I can delete the original JPG file of this black bow if I so choose. I can’t think of a reason why I’d ever need to keep the JPG version of this individual black bow. Especially since I have the PNG file of the black bow. But you can keep yours if you’d like.

And that’s how you take a piece of line art (JPG file) and turn it into a lovely string bow (PNG file). I think it’s pretty easy. But if you’re a beginner it might not feel that way to you. Don’t worry, once you do this a few times it will feel like a very easy process.

I’m going to give you another hint about finding other doodles/line art such as I’ve used today. You’d be surprised by how many images of doodle bows & knots you can find by just doing a search on the internet.

Sometimes you can Right-Click on one of those images and save it to your hard drive. Most often you can visit the link associated with the image to see if you can download it for free. If you can’t Right-Click or download one of these images you could try to do a screen capture and save it to your hard drive that way. Most computer systems/keyboards give you the ability to do a “Print Screen”. If you’re not sure how to do that just search the internet for tips for your specific system configuration.

Note: Please be very careful and respectful of other people’s work. If you save a “captured” image that is marked as licensable, please use it only for personal use (no selling it or sometimes even what is called Scrap For Hire projects). That would be a violation of the creator’s licensing agreement. And do not share the image in ANY online posts.

Now that I’ve brought up licensing (especially with what I’ve shown you today) I’m going to give you some “legalese”. So exactly what is licensing?

The basic definition of licensing is rather straightforward, if somewhat legalistic. A license is an agreement through which a licensee (user) leases the rights to a legally protected piece of intellectual property from a licensor (creator) for use in conjunction with a billable product or service.

Clear as mud, right?!? In basic terms that means if you have a product that has an associated license agreement but you didn’t PURCHASE the product WITH the license agreement, you can run into problems.

Generally speaking, most of the products you purchase from shops are for personal use only (Unlicensed). Some designers offer commercial use products or the ability to add a commercial use license to some of their personal use only products. This makes them Licensed.

Any time we “grab” images off the internet the way I told you about earlier, they absolutely DO NOT include a commercial use license.

The bottom line is, you can’t create something using any unlicensed products and then sell it. You also should not publicly display (publish) any works using unlicensed products in any manner that would convey you are the sole creator. That’s why most (if not all) public scrapbooking forums require that we provide “credits” to properly attribute the designers.

I hope all this makes sense. I just want you to understand how important it is to be mindful of licensing. For most of us it’s not a big deal since we aren’t selling our layouts. But you’d be surprised how even an innocent scraplift of a design can cause an issue if proper credits aren’t given.

So, there you have it…using “vector” doodles to create strings & bows. This is a whole lot easier than trying to draw them, right?!?!?

More String Tips

If you have trouble drawing a curvy line in PSE, remember to look for tips or tutorials on the internet (like the one I mentioned above).

Any time you extract a doodle out of a JPG just take your time to be sure you’re creating a good selection.

Please always be mindful of any images that are licensable. You don’t ever want to commercially use/publish something for which you do not possess a valid license.

Always remember to let your imagination inspire you to make the best use of brushes and doodles.

And above all else…just have fun!

As usual, if you have any questions or want to make a suggestion about a topic you’d like me to cover, please don’t ever hesitate to “Message Me”.

Thanks for reading this week’s Tuesday Tip. Keep an eye out for next week’s post with some final tips about how to keep your stitches looking realistic. If you want to stay informed about new posts, just click “Follow Me” to stay in touch. I hope you have a wonderful week!