Step 1

I did a test toss first because I never did it right in class, using leaves from a photo I took. I am still using this as a background although it will barely be seen, so it was a good practice opportunity.

First, I set up my page as a perfect square, from memory 30cm by 30cm. I then created a square grid using the snap and ruler tools. Then, I put the whole original image in one square, on the bottom right hand corner.

Original picture

Next, using the magnetic lasso and eraser tools I cut out a portion of leaves to use on top of the background image. This cut-out allows me to use the same technique we learnt in class - overlapping this same cut-out many times but rotating it or changing its size, outside the lines of the bottom right-hand box. I had to cut out a few leaves individually because if I just repeated the whole original photo it would create track marks because of the straight edges.

Magnetic lasso tool to cut out some leaves

Once I liked the arrangement, I merged all these layers, and selected and dragged the top, side, and corner parts into the bottom right box. This is what we learnt in class.

Final working repeat, after layering cut out over original picture

Next, I encountered a problem. I remembered in class when I tried to do a toss repeat there was a straight white line running down it because my image and dragged parts were a fraction inside the snap lines. To see if this would happen again I zoomed in and saw it was indeed slightly inside the snap lines once again. Luckily this is an easy fix - I turned off the snap tool and did it manually.

I defined pattern, created a new document, and filled pattern...

Final repeat

It works! I'm really surprised that it worked first time with no track marks or anything.