Most directions you will be finding these days involve rulers and strip piecing are designed for machine sewing. They can be adapted for hand sewing. The big difference is that in machine sewing we can sew long seams and then subcut them, we need to end our hand sewn seams in some way in order to do that.
Back in the day when I started, before rulers, even though I machine sewed, I followed hand rules. But I figured out I could chain stitch, cut grids and things like that. Back then, quilts had a lot more pencil on the backs than they do today! The common way was to have an exact shape you wanted and you drew that shape on the fabric, cut out some sort of seam allowance that you liked, and sewed on the pencil line.
I'd be looking at older books that contain "templates". In a modern book you have instructions telling you to cut a strip, and then into subunits. In the old days, they gave you actual templates for each log in a log cabin -- that sort of thing is more what you want.