Playing in the Swamp

Proverbially, that is.

Last week before we left on vacation, I started paper piecing (ick!) the 16 outer setting squares.  These have 15 pieces each.  I had cut them out before we left from a dozen or so of the greens I have, plus a few blades of deep teal just for variety.  I was really shocked that they took me about 7 hours to sew.  I made a few mistakes, but mostly they were sew iron, repeat.  They need the quarter-circles still, but that's where I had to stop and regroup with the entire design in order to determine which fabric looked the best there.  I layed out the entire broken star...

In my original design, I had the quarter-circles in a deep rose/pink.  It brought a lot of contrast to the design, which it needs since it has so much blue and green.  Unfortunately, it just seemed out of place.  I will have water lilies in pale pink appliqued on top of this quarter-circle (see right part of upper pic), and pale pink flowers on deep pink background was getting circus-like, and not pond-like.  I tried out a couple shades of greens and aqua, but nothing seems as right as a deep marbled blue.  I'll just hope that the water lilies and the bright pink bias piping around the quarter-circle will provide the contrast needed. 

I'm also playing with what color to narrowly outline the inner star.  All the blues and greens seem to disappear.  I'm leaning towards the deep brick red.  It will be a subtle and thin outline, but just enough to set the center star off from where the green leaves of the first round of setting squares begin.

I also played (top pic) with the orientation of the outer 24 diamonds.  Did you catch that??...On one side, the purples point outwards, and on the right side the purple points inward.  The left side gives much better definition.

This top will probably not be too much fun to put together, given the very many number of Y-seams - and a total of 56 pieces to all make lay square and flat.  Sounds daunting!