Glad we went back to basics with this class because it really helped me understand how halftones are built in Illustrator.

Here's my page of practice halftones:

(the skirt shaped one is my attempt to try and see how I might use the gradient mesh technique to shade elements of larger illustrations, not massively successful but I will keep playing!)

 

Here are my 2 hearts:

Image Tracing the top multicoloured one was a little different, just using colours / limited palette / 8 colours. Then I used the recolour artwork tool on the expanded image. Before I'd watched the last bonus video (silly me!) I managed to pick up the black dots and use 'Select > Same > Fill Colour' to grab all the black, then just choose a different fill colour for them (the dark purple).

Here's my repeat heart pattern in a couple of colour ways:

 

 

And here are the random bits I created when playing with Transform / Rotate function:

Thanks for explaining it all in baby-steps Helen, exactly what I needed as my first intro to halftones!