Surface Pattern Design Class

I've been hovering over a couple of surface pattern design classes for quite a while now. I've finally signed up for Module 1 of the pattern design class at Make It In Design and the 5 weeks class started today. I hesitated for the longest time because having no arts background I wasn't sure if I even fit in and also it's not cheap. There are so many people in the class and it's amazing reading all of their backgrounds. Talk about feeling intimidated! But there are a few who do not have any art background either.
It just started today and the private FB group is absolutely buzzing with everyone submitting what they have done in the "Just For Fun" exercise making some strip, dots and circular patterns. I've been doing EVERYTHING on the computer for a long time now. After reading the instructions and the examples, I was so stumped that I didn't know what to do. We were supposed to make patterns from real things?! OMG ... all I could think of was that I don't have anything. Of course in reality, I have so much "stuff" sitting around (fabric, yarn, ribbons, paper, you name it ...) I could have used any of them. I think it was just panic because of the large number of artists and designers in the class. And the monster of comparing myself with others came right out and grab me even though the instructions' video specifically said not to do that. I am not a very good student I guess ... LOL.
A couple of things I have sitting close to me are old catalogs and magazines. So I torn strips off the pages from a magazine and laid them on a white piece of paper. Took a picture of it and decided to try a black background also to see the difference. The lighting the house was so bad and the pictures didn't come out very good. So I brought them into Photoshop and adjusted the levels.

One of the fellow students suggested combining the two.  I really did not think it through when I was combining them. If I were to do it properly I would have sized them both to about the same size and clean the overlapping edge to match the torn look.

The above combined version was laying the 2 images side by side. But before I got to that point, I had brought in both images each in a layer and by accident, I had changed the top layer's mode to "difference". I thought the result was quite nice. I took a screen capture of it so I can see what the setting was because I wasn't going to save the file. Then played around with each of the modes and got the following 2 that I really liked.

This can go on and on and on ... But it's time to stop and go play some more.