make a selection. Options

[Smarmosaur]

ook, i'm using Photoshop CS2. i made a path (with the pen tool, obviously), and i want to be able to like take the contents of the layer in the path and move them to a new file. i figured the best way to do this was to turn the path into a selection, correct? i tried that, but it keeps (and always has, since i've had photoshop) telling me that no pixels were selected.
so, i need somebody to explain to me some way of moving the contents to a different document, using that path.
thanks in advance.