Oh, this old thing?

So my friend Quigs makes awesome purses. She made me this

fantastic purse for my birthday and I use it all the time. Talking to her is quite a hoot too because she is constantly saying "I could totally make that" and I believe her. For someone that had nothing to do with a sewing machine 2 months ago, she has turned into a regular Martha Stewart! :) However, when she gave me my fancy bag, her first comment was "don't look to close at the stitches". Of course, me being me the first thing I did was turn it inside out and check all the seams. I found one little spot that wasn't perfectly straight. Other than that, it looked fantastic and there was no way I could do something like that!

I started embroidery when I was a kid. I was about 12 when my aunt got pregnant with my cousin and I decided to make her a bear and bunny baby name sampler. Unfortunately, I'm tragically slow at the process so I never got it finished for him. I ended up finishing it for WF. Since then, I've worked mostly with cross stitch and WF took one I just finished for him, with tree frogs, to show to Quigs at lunch today. She looked at it and commented on how nice it looked and the very thing out of my mouth was, "don't look at the orange frog, he is all 'Picasso' because I messed up the counts". Then she turned it over to look at the back (presumably to see if she could make something like it LOL) and I said "the back of that one is so ugly, look at this other one that I'm working on"

She seemed fairly impressed with them and I can tell you I'm totally impressed with her sewing so my question is "why do we do that"? It isn't just us, either. I see so many people, when complimented about something they are capable of doing, even if it isn't perfect, saying stuff like "oh, don't look at that" or "well, it isn't the best". Is this a learned "skill"? Is this something that people see other people doing and assume it is something that they should do also? Is this something guys do? It doesn't seem like it, but then no guys I know really do anything crafty so I'm dealing with a potentially abnormal subset of the population.