NEWSLETTER
INSPIRATION
DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKINGShoppe Tips and Tricks ~ Circular Stitches
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Hi, Trish here with another Tips and Tricks post! We’ve had quite a few questions on the blog about turning straight stitches into circular stitches, and I’ve been working on one way to do this so I could help y’all out. I think, after much work and frustration in Photoshop I’ve figured out a way to do it. Now, to get them perfectly round takes a lot of nitpicking with the steps, but I think the imperfect look fits SP’s products so much better.
So, first things first, open your stitches and place them on your page. The stitches need to be lying vertically, if you try to do this with them horizontal it won’t work. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, I just know it doesn’t work. Lol!
Once you get them vertical, go to Filter>Distort>Shear and a box will pop up that looks like this:
Go to the center of the line in the box and click it and drag it all the way to the side of the box.
Next, go about halfway up and down from the mid-point and click and pull those spots until you get a rough semi-circle. It won’t be perfect, we’ll work on that after we do the Shearing steps.
You should now have something that looks about like this:
Now go to Edit>Transform>Warp. Click the tiny squares on the top and bottom of the open side and drag them down (top box) and up (bottom box)…until you get it closer to a semi-circle.
Take your stitch and duplicate it, then flip it horizontally so that your duplicate is the mirror opposite of the other, and then move them so that the edges are touching.
And there you go! You can do the Shear steps in PSE, but as of PSE 7, you cannot do Warp, (newer ones – maybe, I don’t know) but you should still be able to tweak it some to make it work by using distort and such. You can also apply this to ribbons and ric rac, but the wider the object is – the more you can see the distortion it causes - so I really don’t recommend doing a full circle with them. If you use CS and this is something you can regularly see yourself doing, I advise just making an action out of the steps to save yourself time later.
And here is my final page using the BLOSSOM collection!
If you have your own way of turning a straight stitch into a cirlce, we’d love for you to share your technique with us in the comments section! Thanks and be sure to return on Friday as SP will have a fabulous Food Friday post for us! Yummy! :o)
Mar 13, 2011 @ 11:50:03
I saw a comment where someone did something similar to what I did. But it wasn’t quite the same. I just opened a piece of paper in Photoshop, then dragged my stitching onto the page. The edges of the stitching went a little past the edge of the paper. I went up to filter>distort>polar coordinates & made sure that the rectangular to polar option was selected. Hit OK & it automatically creates a circle out of my horizontal stitching. Love it!
Mar 13, 2011 @ 11:52:13
Oh, I also tried this technique using ribbon & it worked perfectly without distorting the image too much.
Mar 10, 2011 @ 00:09:00
WOW, thanks for sharing such a fun tip. I’m so excited to try this out. You guys are awesome!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 23:22:20
Just a heads-up — your RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working.
Mar 09, 2011 @ 23:34:36
I don’t know anything about the RSS feeds, but thanks, I’ll pass that along. :)
Mar 09, 2011 @ 21:15:09
Thanks for all these tips!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 13:55:47
Yay thanks…I found ANOTHER way that might be a little easier too…
In PS CS3 you open your new page (I did a 12×12) Then drag in your stitch. Next use CRTL T. While the box is on it, take your cursor and drag it over on the sides holding down the ALT button, make sure to make it extend a little past your paper or it won’t hook together, your not finished so DON’T hit accept yet. Now make sure the Constrain Proportions is unchecked, and change the Height to 200% and then hit Ok. Now go to filter, Distort, Polor Coordinates and make sure it’s set to rectangular to polar and hit Ok. That should be it…a NEW circle stitch!! HOPE that helps!!
Mar 10, 2011 @ 00:31:00
I must be doing something wrong because I can’t get this to work. I get something that looks like a ripples of water — semi circles getting bigger and bigger. I think maybe I’m messing up at the “take your cursor and drag it over on the sides holding down the ALT button, make sure to make it extend a little past your paper or it won’t hook together” part. If you could redescribe this that would be super. Thanks.
Mar 10, 2011 @ 08:42:51
okay…sorry, I’m not great at describing without pictures! ;) lol
You just need to “stretch” your stitch, you want to make it extend past the paper, so make sure you hold ALT while you do it so that it makes it even all ways, and drag from ONE side. Don’t forget AFTER doing that you need to change the Height to 200%, if it’s something thick or big you may need to change it to 300%, it looks funny at first but it works when you make the circle, And THEN click accept or enter.
LMK if that helps any at all. :)
Mar 10, 2011 @ 15:48:31
Thanks for replying and for sharing!!! So basically you need to have your element extend past the edges of your canvas. Then make it extend 200% more if it’s thicker like ricrac. Then do the Filter-Distort-Polor Coordinates. On mine, if I extended the element the extra % then after it made the circle I had to Ctrl+T to strech it back into a circle.
This is SO cool and SO easy. THANK YOU!
Mar 10, 2011 @ 21:26:09
Thanks so much for the tip Casharina! :o)
Just to add….for polar coodinates it works best if you start with the stitching/ric rac etc at HORIZONTAL not vertical (just to avoid confusion with Trish’s example for Shear).
Mar 10, 2011 @ 22:11:48
you’re welcome…I did FORGET to add that it needs to be horizontal sorry, THANKS!! Also Julie, make sure you are changing the % part at the TOP of the screen where it has H for Height it’s set on 100% normally but you need to change it to 200% or bigger for thicker stuff!
I know…I was SOOO stinkin’ excited when I figured out how to do it!! :) I’d been looking FOREVER to learn!!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 10:27:48
Thanks for this!!! Can’t wait try! :)
Mar 09, 2011 @ 10:24:23
Super excited about this!!! Thanks for sharing. :)
Mar 09, 2011 @ 09:09:30
Wonderful! I’ve wondered how to do this and never taken the time to figure it out. Thanks for sharing the how-to! :)
Mar 09, 2011 @ 08:36:48
YAY!!! awesome, awesome, awesome… i was actually playing with this the other day, only i started with warp and it WASN’T pretty! i will definitely give this a try, thank you so much, great job!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 08:51:50
i don’t know if this is specific to cs5, but i had to rasterize the ‘smart object’ in order to be able to do the warp the way you have it shown here. this may be different for different versions. however, once i did that, it worked perfectly… thanks for the tip!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 08:57:28
Hmm… the only time I’ve ever had to rasterize a layer in CS (I use CS 3) is when I start a page in PSE then open it in CS. So I don’t know. I can ask around though and if it is something specific to CS5 I can add that in as a step for those. Glad you were able to get it to work for you. :o)
Mar 09, 2011 @ 22:19:06
I have CS5 also, and for some reason, almost everything I bring into CS5 opens at a smart object and I have to rasterize. I’m sure there’s a setting that will make this stop, I haven’t figured it out yet :) I just wanted to say that IT HAPPENS TO ME, TOO!
Mar 09, 2011 @ 22:39:00
that makes me feel better, i just assumed it was me… lol!