Creating eyelet lace

In this movie, I'll show you how to make some eyelet lace trim. Let's start by drawing a square that is 10 points by 10 points, an ellipse that is 10 points by 5 points, and one more: a circle that is 3 points by 3 points. These are the shapes we're going to need to make this little bit of eyelet lace. So, let's zoom into them. Take the ellipse, and align it until it snaps in place at the bottom of the square. Select both pieces.

Let's grab Pathfinder, and unite them together. So, now we have this piece with a little scallop on it. We're going to need two of these, so I'm going to Alt and drag till it snaps right next to the first one, and select both of these pieces, and unite those together as well. So, now I have my little swatch piece; this is what's going to make up my side tile for the lace. Let's play with these circles now. Let's zoom in a little closer too. Alright, circles; I'm going to need three total. So, let's Alt+Drag to make a copy, and then Ctrl+D to do it again. We'll select two of those, and group them together.

We'll select all three now, go to Align, and let's align them to make sure they're centered properly. And actually, I think I want them a little closer together; that's better. Make sure they're aligned. We can group those, and now we want them to sit about here, and we'll select both pieces -- these circles, and the little scallop piece -- and we'll align to make sure those are centered, and that looks pretty good. All right, the next thing we're going to do is select the three circles, and copy them, Ctrl+C, and just hold them in the clipboard. We can select everything now.

Go to Pathfinder, and click on Exclude. So, what we just did was we punched these holes into this little swatch here, and it's a little hard to see looking at white on white, but if we change the fill to a color, and we turn off the stroke, you'll see that we actually just punched those holes into the yellow piece. Now we can re-paste the circles that we copied. So, Ctrl+F to paste in front, so we put them exactly in the same place, and now let's get rid of the fill. We'll change the stroke to 0.25, and we are going to add an effect to this.

So, go up to the Menu bar, and select Effect > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag. What we're going to do is add a zig zag effect to give the look of embroidery around these little circles. We'll turn on Preview, which looks kind of horrifying to start, but that's okay. Check Relative, and 10% is what we want, and now we need to adjust the number of Ridges per segment. And probably somewhere around 11, 10, 11 is going to be about right. There's 12; looks pretty good, actually. And I'm going to change this to Smooth, and click OK.

Now, I have the look of little embroidered stitching around my circles. We also need to get an embroidered scallop on the bottom. So, with the Direct Selection Tool, click on one of these scallops, Copy it, Ctrl+C, click on the page to release, and then paste in front. We're going to switch that to no fill, and a black stroke, and we want it to be a 1 point stroke this time, and we're also going to change the Profile, which we could do up here, and we're going to select this one here, the Width Profile 1, so we get this look that goes from thin, to thick, to thin.

Now we're going to use the Scribble effect, but before we can do that, we need to expand this, and change it from a stroke to an object. So, up to Object > Expand Appearance, and we've just changed it from a stroke to an object, and now we can apply the Scribble effect. The sSribble effect is found up here under Effects > Stylize > Scribble. We're going to select Tight, change the Angle to 90 degrees, the Stroke Width to 0.25, the stroke Spacing to 0.3, and the Variation to None, 0 points, because we want it to be consistent, and click OK, and now we've got this little embroidered looking piece down here.

I'm going to go ahead, and select that and copy it, so we can place it on the second scallop. And you can do that by just holding down your Alt and Shift key, and dragging until it snaps into place. Getting closer; just a couple more steps. The next thing we need is a single stroke across the top. So, we'll grab the Direct Selection Tool, select the anchor point on the very top, Copy, click to release, paste in front, and we're going to change that to no fill, and a black stroke. That is 1 point with flat caps; butt caps on the end.

Alright, two more steps. So, now we need to remove the yellow. The only reason we had it there was so that you can see what I was doing with exclude, but we don't need it anymore, so let's select it, and change it from yellow to white, and the last thing we need to do is adjust the placement, because again, we don't want the path to go through the center of this tile. We want it to sit right here at the top of the tile. So, with the Pen Tool, we will add an anchor point down here at the bottom; make sure it has not stroke, and no fill. Click on the Reflect Tool, Alt+Click right along the top path, Horizontal, Copy, and now we have that anchor point up there with no stroke, and no fill.

We'll Group this whole thing together, and that's our side tile. We're also going to need a start and an end tile for this, so let's go ahead and Alt+Drag to make a copy, and then Ctrl+D to duplicate. Let's turn this into our start tile. All we need for the start tile is basically to just close this one side with a path. So, we'll go to default, we'll grab the Pen Tool, and I'm just going to draw a point that goes from here down to my scallop; we'll cut and paste it in front there.

Now, I can put the round on this one, but this one here can have the butt cap; the flat one. We're going to need to have the flat cap there, so it butts nicely against the side tile. Now, we need to do the opposite for the end tile, and I can do that, actually, by just copying; we'll Alt+Drag, and place it over here. So, we'll zoom out, open the Swatches, and let's go ahead and drag the start and the end tile into the Swatches. So, here's my start tile, and I will drag that in. And here's my end tile, we'll drag that one in, so now they're ready to go.

Now I can select the side tile, click on Brushes, make a new Pattern Brush, we'll call this Eyelet, and go to my start tile, and add that one; end tile, and add that. Change the Colorization to Tints and Shades, click OK, and now let's try it out. We'll zoom back out. I've got a couple of paths waiting here, so we'll select the path at the hem, and add a little lace, and why don't we add a little bit on the top as well? Let's grab the Group Selection Tool, so I can grab this path up here, because it's part of the corset that's already been grouped together.

And I'll go ahead and apply the lace, but I think I want it to go in the other direction, so we'll click on this icon here, which is Options of Selected Object, and we'll just flip across, so it goes the other way. And I'll do the same on this side; select the lace, get just that lace piece, and apply the lace, and there is my corset. We've got a couple of extra pieces I don't need now, because the trim is different, and actually, these pieces will need to be extended. They ended short, because that's where the trim piece was.

So, let me go ahead and switch to the Direct Selection Tool, and extend that piece over to where I think it belongs. There we go, and I'll do the same on this side, and zoom back out, and now I have a corset with eyelet trim.