leighway

I've been quilting for at least 30 years and I remember thinking when I began that if Barbara Johanna hadn't written her book about fast piecing, I'd have never gotten into quilting. I couldn't bring myself to use templates.
All these years later, I'm savvy like most of us with rotary and ruler. So, I really feel like a dumbhead asking this BUT...is each pattern in the Dear Jane book done by tracing templates onto plastic (or whatever) and then tracing those on the material, as in the old days?

There was a challenge quilt about two years ago out on the Internet called Pinwheel something or other and it had all these lovely blocks made of different size stars/pinwheels. Each block had a different size star and I just sat there stumped. Did they really want me to use a template? Project stalled....

So, give me the bad news...do we have to go to templates to do these small sampler type blocks?