Thank you! Adjusting the attribute setting and adding a plane made a huge difference in the result of the AO. Not to be obtuse but would you mind sharing a bit of the theory behind why this works?...

Dave,

Yes, those are my UVs. I will move them to the top right half of the box, thank you for the suggestion. Here is the larger AO rendering as you asked for.

Unfortunately, the pillow here is not showing the details of the edge "ruffles" via the ambient occlusion rendering. I thought it was the way I set up the UVs so I have included an image of them. If...