That's a great tutorial/post Carol45! Motivates me to start working on the text for one I'll be making once my current project is just a tiny bit further along. In my case it's about determing the length needed for striped fabric sashing in a diagonally set quilt. That sounds pretty specific but it's about determining your required Linear Inches which is a basic thing you need to do to figure out how much yardage you need, especially when you are working with scraps of fabric and not just easy WoF.
Not Battleaxe's problem but I think it is a huge step for most starting quilters to go away from kits and other people's patterns to their own. I think for someone like me who started before the rotary revolution and really before kits and certainly precuts, it's a bit easier to see a heap of random bits of fabric and figure out something to do with it than it is for someone who started more recently.
I'm lucky that I have Electric Quilt, but I am out of licenses to reinstall so it is on my "other" computer and I have no printer capability. It's easy, quick and fun to draw out the basics in EQ, but I've also gone back to my graph paper pad. It's a way I can quilt in bed while watching tv!
