Transparent Stitching in PSP7 
One of the requirements of the club is that your patch has some sort of transparent stitching, and if you don't know how this can sound really daunting! This is a step-by-step guide which will walk you through adding transparency to your patch, around the stitching.
First, we'll start with a patch template:
..instead of copying this directly into Paint Shop Pro 7, you must first save it to your computer — somewhere handy like the desktop. (Mozilla/Firefox 'eats' transparency turning it black, which interferes with the patch border.)
Once saved, open the template in PSP7 and zoom in (if you've got a scroll mouse, you can do this quickly by scrolling up) — you should be able to see the white part of the patch (where your design with go), the dark border and the 'transparency colour'.
The transparency colour must be a colour that you're not using in your patch design, as it's this that will be replaced with transparency later on. The patch is currently saved using grey but I prefer a lime green because I know I'll never use that in a patch! :9
Because the patch template has already been saved as a gif, and gifs only support up to 256 colours we have to increase the amount of colours to edit the patch directly. Using the menubar across the top go to "Colors" > "Increase Colour Depth" > "16 Million Colors".
Now that you've basically re-enabled the colour palette you can add your design — don't forget to replace the light grey transparency colour with another if you need that shade of grey elsewhere in the patch design. When you're ready, hold in the CTRL key to automatically use the colour-picker tool, then right-click the colour you've decided on for the transparency colour. This picks the colour ready for saving, which means we won't have to try to find it later.
Using the top menubar, select "File" > "Save As..." — name the file and choose "CompuServe Graphics Interchange" from the file type menu. Before you click the "Save" button, click "Options" > "Run Optimizer..." to open the transparency window. Under "What areas of the image would you like to be transparent?" choose "Areas that match this color" (the colour you right-clicked before should be in the little swatch-box). Click "OK", then "Save".
You should have something that looks a bit like this (hopefully more creative!):
...with nice transparent edges. You'll know if you've done it right because the patch won't have a solid colour background around the black border.
