Tutorials: I would like to make ricrac ribbon using photoshop elements

Ricrac Ribbon

This will be a nice easy tutorial and give results straight away :) I can see you smiling already after reading some of my tutorials. The great thing about this one is it can be as simple or complicated as you like. I will start with the simple.

Open a new window, 20 cm by 20 cm, 300 per inch,RGB, transparent and name it ricrac. Either place a piece of ribbon element into the box or use your marquee tool to mark out a 1cm by 20 cm box and using the paint bucket tool flood fill with the color of your choice. Control D to get rid of the marching ants. So you will have this:

The top one is the flood filled box before deselect and the bottom one is a ribbon I made. Click on the box to enlarge it if you can't see very well.

Now is the time to add some texture if you like. I made a texture to give the effect of the stripey lines you get on ricrac. You should be able to right click on it and 'save as' then use on your ribbon. Or you could go into the filter tab and go down to texturiser, then textures and choose from burlap or canvas, both are nice.

Lay the downloaded texture over the top of your ribbon and using the move tool stretch to fit. Go to the layers box and click where it says normal, a menu will drop down. I tried a few to see which one I liked the best. Soft light was good, as was linear burn. Use control G to make sure there are no overlapping areas and merge visible.

(If you think you will be doing more editing on the texture stage then drop the ribbon into a new 20cm by 20cm box by opening a new window, clicking on the ribbon window in the project box and drag and dropping into the new window.)

You now have a ribbon with a texture to it ready to be turned into ricrac. Go to filter tab on the top menu. Click and go down to distort, now click on wave. A new box will appear. It will look like this.