It's definitely meant as a huge compliment.
And since people are saying they thought you'd had it done by someone else (presumably paying someone to do it), that should be taken as a vote of confidence that it's a salable design.
That said, I don't know how you'd feel about going commercial with your artwork. Some people in the SCA asked me how I could bear to part with my needlepoint items, even though I was being paid for them. The truth is, I did needlepoint for a couple of years, gradually practicing and improving, and ran out of family members to give stuff to. It occurred to me that there were several craft stores in town that sold on commission, so I decided to try it. My hobby turned into a seasonal home business.
As for bearing to part with something I'd made, when you have a pattern it's easy enough to replicate an item, and the designs I created myself were never submitted or published anywhere. I've got the only patterns in existence, and most of those are just jotted down on graph paper. So there are a lot of things I sold over the years that I had no real emotional attachment to after I'd made a few dozen of them. But the specially-commissioned ones that were only made once, for a specific person, some of which were fairly difficult... I can't see doing a lot of those for sale, since some of them were personal to the recipient.
(Someone once asked me for a realistic horse pattern for a tissue box cover, and I was in a panic, since I had none in my craft books and I haven't been around horses enough to get a real feel for their anatomy and how to depict that with needlepoint - my dad brought me some of his Louis L'Amour novels with horses on the front cover and he did a sketch of a couple; from there I was able to create a pattern.)
