ummmm.....?

hello everyone!

i would like to thank everyone for the wonderful tutorials on textures and photoshop, you are all amazingly gifted. thank you for sharing your hard earned knowledge.

i am hoping that someone will be able to help me with a problem that i have. i have been working on following the steps in this tutorial: http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/04/day-195-creating-clothes-with-photoshop.html

i get through the first cut out following the steps one by one, just fine. came out perfectly and i was all excited! i learned something new! with my eagerness i went on to the next steps and followed them step by step and went to clear the section and...nothing.
i'm so confuzzled. i did every step just like i did before. i even went back and double checked that they were the same...and yep. each step matched what i did initially.

is there anything that stands out that i did incorrect?

{{i know it's not perfect looking, i was just trying to get the concept down and then perfecting it.}}

you have the wrong layer selected.

i have tried selecting the other layer to the same effect. when i set the first anchor point, the layer that is selected in the picture is created. i did not notice if this happened for the first section or not as i was concentrating on following the instructions.

That's odd. Just as a double check, here are the steps you should have used....

(a) Make your mask layer (the black one you're cutting holes in) active.
(b) Choose the pen tool.
(c) Place anchor points around the area you want to cut out.
(d) Change the pen tool into the Convert Point tool.
Click on any of the anchor points and then drag on it to reshape the path in its vicinity.
(f) When the path looks right, right click inside the path and choose Make Selection.
(g) In that dialog window, choose New Selection.
Use Edit >> Clear to remove everything in the selection.

That should work unless somehow you have either activated a different layer (easy to do by mistake), or forgotten to do step (f), or you are trying to cut a hole in the Background layer. Since you have already managed to cut one hole, I imagine the third possibility isn't the correct one. My bet is on the second one.

ah ha! successsssss!!

what was happening, and for whatever reason, one setting on the pen tool kept getting changed. simply starting over with a fresh load of Photoshop and a fresh shot at the shirt fixed the setting. i am not sure why it wouldn't stay to "paths" for the pen tool instead of "shape layers."

thank you everyone for you help. now that i know what is going wrong, i know the fix to make it work.