Spoonflower Kaleidoscope Challenge

I was so excited for the Kaleidoscope challenge at Spoonflower. Since I use a lot of my photography in my designs, it's a technique that I often use to create a repeating pattern.

My initial idea was to do an image using a photo of some of my colorful tumbled stones. I'm a bit of a geologist and have a large collection of rocks. I took a photo of a bunch of them laid out.

Then played around with them.

None felt quite right to me. 

I played around with various photos.

This one was fun, but still not what I wanted to enter.

Then I came across some photos I took of 1,000 paper cranes made by elementary students. It's a photo that I've tried to turn into a textile design before trying to make it a repeating pattern, but was never happy with the result. The details are just to hard to see.

But when I turned it into a Kaleidoscoping image, I loved it! I came up with a few different variations.

In the end, I picked this one. 

The brighter colors attracted me to it. Here is a photo of it as wallpaper. It looks like a beautiful and intricate mosaic. 

This is a close up image of the design. 

Voting begins today! Vote at - https://www.spoonflower.com/design-challenge/kaleidoscope