Unique Embellishment
In last week’s post about creating stitches on a selection, I told you to check back this week to learn about a unique embellishment. I thought it might be fun to show you a cute “shaker” embellishment that can be made using that stitching technique.
It’s highly unusual in digital scrapbooking but nonetheless still cute & fun…
Shaker Pockets
I used to absolutely love including these in my traditional paper scrapbook layouts. But they were particularly fun when making cards “back in the day”. A lot of people aren’t too familiar with them now. Here’s a sample just in case you aren’t sure what they are:
They certainly don’t have the interactive feel or mass appeal in a digital layout but they’re still “cute” & also still available. The image above is actually a set of shaker pockets by Maris Lerin at DigitalScrapbooking.com.
Every so often I’ll include a digital one. But I will admit that I don’t use them anywhere near as much as I used to back in the good old days 😉 I thought it might be a treat to show you how to create your own shaker pocket.
So just for fun, today let’s play a bit.
A quick reminder before I go further…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.
A usual, I’m working on a 12×12 file and I’ve pulled in a random pastel background just so I’m not working on a white page. There’s no reason this can’t be accomplished on a smaller or larger scale, so do what suits you best.
I have this random heart shape from my stash that I’ll be using as my stitching “template”:
I’m just going to create a simple “straight” stitch around this heart using the hyphen character. I’m going to use the Text on Selection option in the font tool. It’s the one with the T inside a “dashed line” box:
Next, I’ll select a font. It’s good to pick a font that’s not too thin or “fancy”. You can experiment with different fonts to get different results. I’m just going to use Arial Regular at 30pt and I’ll keep the Color set to black for now. Again, you can experiment with different sizes to fit your needs.
Since I want the stitching to go around the heart (for now), all I have to do is make a selection of that heart shape. If you read my post about making selections, you know that all I have to do is Ctrl+Click on the heart layer thumbnail. And the “marching ants” will appear:
With the selection made I now have to click somewhere inside the selection to initiate the next step. PSE will now ask that I confirm the selection to be used for text:
I just click the check mark to confirm. PSE then shows a thin line “path” around where the marching ants used to be. All I have to do is position my cursor at a good starting point anywhere around the path until I see the typing icon (the “I-Beam” I’ve talked about before). And I click where I want to begin stitching:
Before I begin stitching, I can now make any necessary changes to my font settings, specifically the Tracking.
I don’t know if you noticed that before this point, I didn’t have the option to change things like Tracking, Leading, Justification or font “attributes” like bold or italic. I’m not sure why PSE does things this way. But now’s the time to make those initial selections. They can all be changed later if necessary:
I’m going to use a tracking value of 160 because I don’t want the stitches to be too close together. I’m also going to set the Justification to Center align. I certainly don’t need to worry about the leading or the other attributes at this point.
I can now start typing. As soon as I do that, PSE automatically creates a new layer above the heart shape. Which is exactly what I want since those stitches really need to be on their own layer. And I simply type hyphens until I have “stitched” around the entire shape:
Now I can re-size that “stitch” layer so it fits inside the heart shape:
To finish the pocket look I first want to change that heart shape so it’s “transparent”. I can do this in several ways but the easiest is to just change the color to a soft grey (#c3c0bb) and set the opacity to 25%:
I need to add some “dimension” to this heart. Right now, it looks awfully flat…not much like a pocket at all. I’m sure you’re figuring I’m just going to add a bevel. You would be correct there. But before I can do that, I need to pay attention to one thing in particular.
If this was a real pocket, it would be “raised up” around the stitches. If I apply a bevel to the heart as it is, it would only bevel around the outer edge. I need to create a beveled edge “around” those stitches. So, now you’re likely wondering how I’m going to do that.
I’m going to “cut” those stiches out of the heart! To do this all I have to do is ensure the heart layer is active and then Ctrl-Click on the stitching (text) layer’s thumbnail so I see the “marching ants” around the stitching:
Ensuring that the heart layer is still active, I just press the Delete key, hide the stitches layer and cancel the selection. I now can see that the stitches have been cut out of the heart:
Now I’ll add the bevel. I’m just going to use the standard Bevel style that comes with PSE. I select the Scalloped Edge bevel. It looked okay but I do want to change the scaling. So, I go to the top tool bar and select Layer->Layer Style->Scale Effects:
In the image directly above you can see how the Scalloped Edge bevel looks…I want it to be smoother than that.
When PSE opens the Scale Effects dialog box, I set the Scale value to 80% and here’s the beveled heart:
This is so much nicer. But next I want to add a little “sheen” to that heart so it looks more like plastic. Thankfully I have another set of styles that will do the trick; “Stylin’ #187 – Plastic Pocket Styles” by Mommyish:
If you read my prior post about using layer styles you already know we can’t always apply more than one style to a layer. And that’s the case this time. This is what I called complex style layering.
So, before I can apply another style to this “pocket” I need to duplicate the heart shape with the first style. I then simplify that duplicate layer. I can now add the plastic style to that duplicate layer.
Next, I load the plastic styles & select the style named “Plastic Pocket 1b”. I did scale it down a bit to 90% so the “crinkles” didn’t look quite so big:
Not only does this plastic layer now add the sheen I wanted, it also forms the top layer of the shaker pocket. So, I now have a completed pocket. Well, almost.
Before I “fill” this pocket I want to give you another approach to the plastic layer. If you have an appropriate plastic style in your stash already you can skim past the next several paragraphs.
If you don’t have a plastic style, you can try using a plastic texture. I found some nice, free plastic textures at Indieground:
Since I am not using a style, I don’t need to duplicate the heart layer. Instead, I can just pull one of those free textures above the heart layer. I’ll be using the one named “indieground-plastic-textures-04”:
Then I just rotate & re-size it until I like how it fits over the heart:
With the plastic layer still active I Ctrl+Click on the heart layer’s thumbnail so I can create a selection of the heart shape:
As you can see, the selection looks like two hearts. The reason for this is because the selection is also around the stitching “cut outs” that I made earlier. And this is perfect, I certainly don’t want plastic over those holes!
And if I’m not happy with how the plastic is positioned, now would be the time for me to make any adjustments. I’m pretty happy with the positioning so I’ll leave it as is. With that plastic layer still active I create a new layer using that heart shaped selection (Ctrl+J) and then hide (or delete) the original plastic layer:
As you can see, it’s definitely not transparent. To fix that all I have to do is change the blend mode on the plastic layer to Lighten. Here is what happens:
It’s not quite the same look as when I used the plastic style but it certainly “accomplishes the mission”. And using a free texture is always better than having to go out and purchase a style that you may not use very often.
Regardless of which method used to create that plastic layer, it’s time to fill the “pocket” with some scatters. I’m going to go back to the version of the plastic heart created with the style. Next, I’m just going to pull in a couple of random scatters from my stash and layer them under the plastic heart layer:
All that’s left is to add the stitching back in. Traditionally, “real” pocket shakers don’t have actual stitching as they’ve been fused rather than actually sewn. Most digital pocket shakers tend to have stitching. But it certainly isn’t necessary.
I definitely don’t like the black that I started with at the very beginning. But it’s certainly easy to change. Now, I’m kind of torn between using white or some other color that would show up better. Let’ see what white looks like.
It’s hard to notice the “flat” white stitches right now. But I still need to add the texture to these stitches as I did with others over the past few weeks. The set of string styles by Karen Schulz that I used in last week’s post doesn’t have a white option but there is a nice pink that I thought might work but it sort of clashes with the “glitter scatter”.
Note: I could have opted to use Karen’s stitching style since it has a white option. But I preferred to go a different direction.
Since that string style didn’t work out, I’m going to just use the “manual” method I outlined in my Sewing Essentials post so I can keep the color at white:
With the shaker pocket fully assembled, it’s now time to save it as a PNG so I can add it to a layout later. All I have to do is remove the background and crop the file to an appropriate size before saving it as a standalone element. Here’s how it looks:
I hope you enjoyed this and will try making a shaker pocket of your own.
Fill Elements For Shakers
You can “fill” your shakers with all manner of bits & things which I normally refer to as scatters. Things like:
- Glitter Bits
- Sequins
- Confetti
- Beads
- Gems & Rhinestones
- Buttons
- Really just about anything that looks fun and fits your layout!
You can even fill your shaker with “liquid” using ooze, slime, goo, paint or water elements that you might have. Or you can make your own liquid. All you need is some paint and a “water” style such as Style No.32 – Water by Sahin Designs:
As for bushes…there are oodles of brushes out on Brusheezy.com that will work for creating all manner of liquid elements.
There are three that I would recommend you consider:
Paint Splash Photoshop Brushes
I’m going to show you very quickly how to make water. I’ll start with a blank 12×12 file. I will fill the initial layer (Layer 1) with black. This will make it super easy to tell how the water looks. I then create a new layer above the black layer and name it Water Brush.
Next, I’m going to set my foreground color chip to a very pale light blue (#d8edf9). If you’re following along you can use whatever color you like. Shades of green work great if you want to create slime 😉
I’ve used brushes from each of the three packs mentioned above but I thought the Water Splashes Brushes would give you a fun idea of what you can do to create liquid:
You might be able to guess that I chose the first brush in the last row labeled 376. If you read my “Modern Gesso” post you know that’s the size of the brush not the actual name. You can see the actual brush name by hovering over the brush image. This particular brush has a rather unusual name… ”istockphoto_10379893-water-splash.jpg”. And again, if you read that gesso post you also know this name likely indicates that the brush was created by extracting that splash from an iStock photo.
With the Water Brush layer active and my brush selected I just “stamp” the water onto the layer:
Since the size of that brush was so small (376px high) I had to re-size and reposition it to get the image you see above.
I know at first glance this looks an awful lot like water and you’re probably wondering why I need to add a style to that. I need to add a style because even though the “shading” on this image makes it look just like water, it’s “flat”…no real texture to make it look as though it’s lifted off the paper. I’ll zoom in really close so you can hopefully see what I mean:
Now I’ll add a style from the Sahin Designs set I mentioned above. But first I need to explain something I don’t think I’ve ever addressed before.
Some styles like the one I’m about to use will actually make your image translucent. I touched on this briefly in my post about Photoshop Styles back in June 2023. But I don’t think I specifically explained it this way. If I apply one of Sahin Designs’ water styles to this pale blue water splash, it will become “clear”:
It has more texture but I’ve lost the blue color. Since that blue I used was so pale it’s probably hard for you to see much of a difference. Regardless, the color I chose is now gone. So I clear that layer style to get back to the blue splash.
In order to preserve that color, I’m going to duplicate the Water Brush layer, move the duplicate below the original, rename it to Water Style and then hide the original. Next, I’ll add the water style named “sahindesigns-styleno32-12” to the duplicate layer. I unhide the original Water Brush layer and change the blend mode to Linear Burn. Here’s my “styled” blue water:
And now I have a blue water splash. If I wanted this splash to look less like water and more like goo or slime, I could add a bevel to make it look “thicker”.
To accomplish that I do need to keep the Water Style layer in place (below the original Water Brush layer). I also need to make note of the Lighting Angle used for the water style. It is set to 45 degrees. I’m glad I checked that because PSE bevels use a lighting angle of 90 degrees.
I then once more duplicate the original Water Brush layer and name the new layer Water Bevel. But this time I’ll leave the duplicate above the original. I can leave the blend mode set to Linear Burn. I then apply the standard PSE bevel named “Simple Pillow Emboss”. With the bevel applied I need to make some adjustments to get the “thicker” effect.
So, I double click on the “FX” icon on the Water Bevel layer to open the layer style options. Because the bevel style has a lighting angle of 90 degrees, I know PSE has also now changed the water style settings to reflect that Lighting Angle. But as soon as I change the Lighting Angle in the Bevel style to 45 degrees, PSE will also set the water style back to 45 degrees. I could have left both styles at 90 degrees but I did like the 45-degree setting better.
Next, I’m going to change the Size of the bevel to 90px. And here is my “thicker” water:
Now, if I change the blend mode on the Water Bevel layer from Linear Burn back to Normal, I get an even more pronounced effect:
And that’s your bonus lesson on how to create liquid. Imagine how much fun you can have creating all kinds of ooey, gooey elements using this technique in colors that are less like the water I started with! Now go have fun playing with that!
Additional Thoughts On Shakers
These adorable embellishments aren’t interactive like they were in the “old days”. But they definitely add a touch of uniqueness to any project.
Think about creating a full-length “pocket” along one edge of your layout for an extra 3-D effect to the page. A pocket across the top could contain things like raindrops clouds or maybe birds. A pocket across the bottom could hold sand for a beach themed layout. And a pocket along the side edge could actually hold “falling” leaves or assorted “dangles”. Use your imagination…experiment…have fun!
Be sure to make the bottom layer of the pocket as transparent as possible so the underlying paper shows through well. Unless that is, you’re specifically trying to “camouflage” whatever is underneath.
Shaker pockets aren’t just for scrapbook layouts. You can include them on digital cards as well.
I hope you “shake things up” in your routine and just enjoy playing with shaker pockets. And please drop me a note to let me know what you think of this technique.
As always, 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. Please join me next week to read about creating your own string elements. If you want to stay informed about new posts, just click “Follow Me” to stay in touch. I hope you have a wonderful week!