Modern Mini Challenge at Ellison Lane and PTS 10 pillow

If you're joining me from the Modern Mini Challenge linky at Ellison Lane, welcome!

This is sort of like a two-for-one post.  I was planning to post about the pillow I made for my partner for PTS 10 (Jess at The Elven Garden) anyways, and I wanted to enter it in Jennifer's Mini Challenge, so here it is!

My PTS 10 partner's mosaic was full of lots of saturated color and paper piecing.  I knew right away that I was going to do a more complicated paper piecing block if I wanted to really impress.  I started looking around and eventually came across the Evan's Star block from Quilter's Cache.

To start, I made a mock-up to play with the color palette I intended to use (Chicopee and natural linen):

Then I got busy making the quadrants of each block:

This pillow would need 4 blocks to be a good size, and each block had 4 sections of paper piecing, to that was 16 quadrants.  To achieve the look I was going for, I had to pay close attention to the layout of the different prints within each color group.  There were a few mishaps, but nothing a seam ripper couldn't handle.

I love the look of a back-lit block.  Kind of reminds me of stained glass.  This is one block, or four of the above quadrants pieced together.

Here's the completed pillow top, after joining all 16 quadrants together in the correct pattern.  Notice the differences in this and the mock-up.  I omitted the pink-ish border.  Jess stated many times in comments on lots of the other pillows that she's not a fan of pink, so I didn't want to add any more in than necessary.  I also changed up the layout to make sure there wasn't too much pink saturated in the main parts of the pillow and instead broke it up to mostly fall along the perimeter.

The next part was deciding how to quilt it.  I intended to do some great echo quilting around the secondary X pattern (made by the aqua and chartreuse colors).  But after doing so, it just looked so busy.  Again, I made friends with the seam ripper.  Then I tried the same echo idea around the stars, with the same busy result.  Finally I decided to echo the tertiary polygram shape (sort of octagonal?) made by the stars.  That worked out wonderfully!  Not too busy, but still complimented the piecing nicely.

The quilting doesn't show up well in photos, but perhaps if you squint...

The backing is more scrappy Chicopee, including an under-the-flap zipper closure.

Here it is soaking up the sun before beginning its journey Down Under!

Pillow Stats

Size: 18" x 18"

Pattern: Evan's Star by Marcia Hohn/The Quilter's Cache

Fabric: Chicopee by Denyse Schmidt and Essex Linen in Natural