"fun" with Whimsical Quilt Garden

Yesterday afternoon I made a terrible mistake and shared with my husband that I hate a quilt.  This quilt....
This is Whimsical Quilt Garden.  It did look like this.

While preparing it for quilting, I kept feeling like something was off with the setting, or the applique, or the colours, or something.  I delayed about three weeks finishing the sandwiching while staring at the quilt laid out on the bed.  Finally I  decided to leave it alone, and began quilting it.  Well, hardly...it sat at my machine for a week or two while I played with a bit of quilting on it, mostly some free motion anchor stitching on the narrowest inner block frame.  This quilt was just not making me happy...this seems to me happening a lot to me lately!  Making a quilt then changing my mind!

The background here is more of the true colour...if it was as white as the picture above, I think that would have been a better background choice.

I ripped off the borders (while the quilt was still sandwiched!) and sewed on new narrow navy borders.  I was thinking that those diamonds didn't seem to fit, and there should have been a wider band of navy between them and the centre of quilt...I had tried to do that when first adding the diamonds but the math didn't work without making the inner border too wide or the diamonds too small.  So off went the diamonds!  On went a narrow border!

When Mike came home, I showed him the quilt and tried to explain .... while I like the pattern of the applique, I think I chose the wrong colours for the "modern" feel of the pattern, the setting seems dark and crowded, and I just don't like it.   He said that it was a fine quilt, and plenty of people would be happy to have it...maybe so I said, but not with my name on it!

I went to the kitchen to make coffee, came back to the living room, and Mike and the quilt were gone!  He had taken the quilt across the street to a neighbour and showed it to their 14 year old daughter!!!  Oh I was mad.  According to Mike, she liked it and wanted to have it after it's finished. I knew that there wasn't anything terribly wrong with the design, but that it could be improved.

I came up with some great drawings on EQ, but now realize that because many elements of the applique lean on to another block....re-setting is not likely an option.  Still thinking!