Thinking of moving to IL, advice needed

Greetings!

I'm a pattern designer who has been working with  paper, but I am thinking of moving to Illustrator. Basically I'd like to scan a lot of my old design to vector and improve them in Illustrator, I have some familiarity with vector based software so I have a few questions about IL.

There are 3 functions that Ibelieve I'd need to use; and I'd appreciate if some experienced people could let me know if these operations are possible, and briefly, how it'd be done [or just point me in the right direction!]..

1. Is it possible to take a curved area within 2 paths and straighten it to create a brush? To illustrate what I mean, I attach a scan detailing it it visually.

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d188/OphidianShenzi/imgexample.gif


2. Is it possible to do the following with a scanned black and white image..

i. erase the blank background and convert areas by pen into editable vector shapes. Previous attempts at this sort of thing have given me  flattened white and black images that i have not been able to edit in any way [essentially I can only effect the entirescanned  image, whih doesnt diffrentiate my pen from the page]..
For example; I scan an image , and IL vectorizes it, plotting vector points and allowingn me to digitally edit what was originally a hand drawn image, for example digitally changing the dimensions one petal on a hand drawn rose.

ii. erase the blank background and convert the areas filled and stroked into paths [creating a 'wireframe' of the original scan].
For example; I take the scanned image of a rose which I can convert into a series of vector lines which can then be stroked, or overlid with various brushes?

Sorry if this seems lengthy but thisnt the sort of question I could just plug into Google!

Thank you :)


Edited by Shenzi - 25/Nov/2009 at 9:34pm