Well, I decided to give this a try and hopefully its close to what you had in mind. Firstly, we need to create a custom brush with rope texture then take this brush and manipulate its characteristics so that it flows along with your stylus (mouse cursor). Now this works better if you have a drawing tablet since it affords you better control in tracing around your Texas map.

What I did was to scan an image from a knot tying book I have of a rope drawing and used that as the basis of my brush texture with some manipulation to better confine the brush along its flow. I isolated by selection a part of the rope image that gave a good look of the rope texture using 3 wraps of the rope. I skewed the 3 wraps by squashing them together towards the center. I then elongated this by scaling vertically slightly. I now had my brush texture. I then selected my texture. In the edit menu I clicked on define brush and it was entered into my brush palette.

Now to manipulate the brushs characteristics I clicked on the brush palette. In the brush tip shape section I used the spacing slider so that the brush texture butted together end to end and then used the rotation tool to align the brushs tip to give as smooth a flow as possible and checked on smoothing.

I now clicked on brush dynamics and left size and roundness jitter to off and leaving angle jitter to 0% I set the control for direction.

I then gave my new brush a test run to see how it would behave. Not perfect but whatever doesnt flow correctly, you could then go in and post edit those sections to your liking later.

Now to secure the outline of the State of Texas for the next phase.