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  This tutorial makes use of that black and white clip art your disks are brimming with. Let's get some of the money back we spent on those disks. If you did not spend money on clip art, you can use a ding for this tutorial. If you use a ding, use it to make a merged black and white image. Make the ding size about 250 pixels wide, right click and merge all.   Click here to get the background texture I used for this stationery.

	1. Before starting this tutorial, you'll want to resize the clip art so that it is the size you want your finished border piece to be. Click format/dimensions to open the resize dialog box.  Change the unit to pixels, and leaving "keep aspect ratio" checked, change the width to 300 or less.
	2. If your clip art is not grey scale, (Look at the color palette to the right. All grey colors means it is grey scale.) change the image to grey scale. In the lower right hand corner, click the rainbow, or the number 256, and click grey scale (8 bit).
	3. Click the icon that looks like a grey page at the far left of the row of icons to open a new canvas. Click current image so that the size is the same size as your grey scale image. Click the box next to canvas in this box, and select the main color for your piece.  Click ok.
	4.  Click edit/fill, and click the image tab.  Click the three dots, and browse to find the image you will be using for your tile.  Make sure "tile the image" is dotted, and click ok.
	5. Now click selection, and you will see a thumbnail of your grey scale image there. Click ok.
	6. Right click and click convert to object.  7. Right click again, and click shadow.  x and y axis 8, Transparency 25, and soft edge 15.
	8. Right click again, and click split shadow. (version 6 users will find this command in the object menu.) 9. Right click, and click shadow again. This time, change the color to white, x and y axis should be 1, transparency 25, soft edge 2.
	10. Now press space to select the background.  Use the quick color commands to change the background color so that it is lighter than the top.  This adds to the effect.  If you are making a strip for stationery, or a web page background, You will need to fill the object on top of your canvas with a solid color to make it easy to make a continuous strip.  11. Click edit/fill.  Click the color tab. click the color rectangle and choose any color you like for this. It is best to choose a color that is very differnt than the main color of the background.   It will be filled with the texture in a few more steps.  12.  Right click and click merge all. Right click again, and click copy.
200 pixels high	13.   At this time, you will need to find out the height of the texture you are using for the background fill.  The texture that I have provided for this tutorial is 200 pixels high.  That means my strip has to be either 200 pixels high, or a multiple of 200.  I could multiply 200 by 2 and get a height of 400 pixels for instance.  If it is not either 200 or a multiple of 200, I will get a line of unmatching texture where the strips meet when they tile.  In this case, since my original piece of clip art was 203 pixels high, It is best that I re-size my piece that I have so far to 200 pixels so that my strip will be seamless.
	14. Again, open a new image.  Click the circle beside active image, and change the width to 1152.  For the canvas color, right click on the sqare, and click eydropper.  Click the color that you filled the top object with.  Click ok.
	15.  Right click on the canvas and click paste.  Right click and merge all.  Change to the magic wand, and use it to select the plain color in the image.  In my case, I have filled the color with green.  To slelect what I needed, I clicked the green.  In the attribute toolbar, unclick search connected pixels.  Otherwise, the gill and the eye of the fish won't be selected.  I found I had to turn the similarity up to 54, or I got unwanted specks of green.  Now fill the selection with the texture as explained in step 4.  Optimize your image.  (Web/ image optimizer)  In most cases, you can use at least 75 percent compression with little loss of image quality.  Version 6 users should always click the 1:1 button to see the image full size.  A few colors will recquire a lower compression rate, such as bright reds.  For those, use 80 or 85%. If you want to see the strip full size, click on the thumbnail to the left.