Termi, I can't help much with Y-seams; I got mine done half by machine and half by hand. I googled y-seam quilting tutorials on line and followed the instructions as best I could. Still very confused by y-seams.
As for templates, I made my whole FWS quilt and am doing Pony quilt with templates. I trace around the template with a very sharp pencil on the right side of the fabric. This way when some of them call for template A and template AR (reversed) they come out correctly. This is the way I learned to quilt looooong ago, and it worked for me. Good luck!