A bit more about the project and my sister's suggestion. I was visualising a quilt made of squares in bight pinks with some oranges and reds, then touches of greens, trying to emulate Kaffe Fassett's approach to colour, while only having a few of his fabrics among those I've acquired for this. I'm still playing with design ideas, but was inclining to 9in blocks, using mainly a basic 9-patch. But I don't want it to have an obvious regular pattern so I've been switching a few of the squares around and was also going to make some 4-patch 3.5in squares to include in the blocks and some 9in 4-patch - ad I say, it was stil very much a work in progress. My sister's simple suggestion was to place small squares in the centre of some of the patches. It brought the whole thing alive, and that's when all my confidence and excitement just drained away. The joy for me had been that at last I was doing something that was my original work, which I've wanted to do for so long. But I didn't have the inspiration to see that such a simple addition would make it so much better.
There's rational about this, I know. After all, I'm basing the quilt on Kaffe Fassett's ideas, so it's hardly truly original! But ideas come so easily to my sister and are so elusive for me. It just brought back feelings of failure and of being untalented and uncreative that dogged me for years.