Help

I checked the archives and, although I admit to not knowing exactly what I was looking for, I failed to find the effect I wished to achieve in creating my icon. Uhm, well what I'd like to do is get rid of the white so that the blank spaces become transparant.
I'm using PSP9, what I initially thought to do was to promote a background layer and delete the white spaces using the magic wand... but that didn't work so... help, please ^_^