My guess is that I am not alone in having a quilt project take on a life of its own and evolve as you work on it. The quilt my friend Sue and I made for Scott and Angela definitely changed throughout the making. I originally sketched out a fairly simple diagonal block pattern, cut the strips and spent a bunch of time moving fabrics around to get the arrangement I thought worked. Sewed all the blocks together and found myself thinking, ick, that is just clunky. So I went back and added applique strips over top with decorative stitching. Loved the look and the accent the decorative stitching added. (FYI, decorative stitching uses up a lot of thread, so plan accordingly!)
All good, then I put it together and once again didn’t like it. It still looked too chunky. So, I did a crazy/brave thing, I cut the quilt right through the middle of each row of squares and reassembled. And… yes, that is the look I wanted, whew.