Jade's B-Day Quilt - Part 1

I'm starting on another quilt project.  This time my friend Jade will be turning 55 in July so this quilt I will be making for her.  I got the design from a book called Color Shuffle by Karla Alexander.

Here is the one I will be making but again I will be modifying it since the original pattern makes a twin size quilt and that is too large for my to comfortably quilt in my machine.  She used green and turquoise fabrics while I will be using green and blue fabrics.

Now again I have a beef with the author of this book and this particular pattern.  The block is based on a 10 1/2" squares of fabrics, 6 layers of various colour combinations, you them chop them up, shuffle certain sections and then sew back the block.  The cuts are based on the wonky principle so technically you aren't suppose to be worried about how exactly the blocks are cut as long as they look sort of similar to the diagram posted.  This is what is posted and there are no measurements given as per the nature of wonky block making. Once you put your block back together you are suppose to trim it down to an 8" block which when sewn into the quilt will result in a 7 1/2" finished block.

So I'm thinking great, this should go quickly and I don't have to worry about measuring things.  So I cut up my first set of 6 fabric squares, do the fabric shuffles and begin to sew up a block.  I then go to trim it and OOPS!!!!!  This is what I get, if I was to trim it down to the 8" I would be chopping off some of the points of the inner sections of the block.  Also no matter how I place the ruler I would end up cutting off some points.

So in reality the proportions of how this block is cut are important even though it is not stated in the book.  So I now have more scraps for the scrap bag and have to re-think this.  I'm now hoping that the diagram in the book is true to proportion in terms of the cuts and decide to measure it, calculate the percentages of each section and then convert them to what those sections would be based on the 10 1/2" block.  Here are my calculations.

I then try this out using just one piece of fabric, cut it up and then re-sew it to see if I can then trim it to the 8" block size without losing any points.  SUCCESS!!!  I then take my next pile of 6 fabrics and cut then according to my calculations and here are 2 finished blocks.

So I'm glad that I was able to figure out how to solve this problem but it annoys me to no end when you pay good money for a book only to get faulty instructions and end up wasting fabric.  It's bad enough when I screw up and do the wasting, but I don't need to waste fabric based on someone else's screw ups or omissions. Fortunately I'm the type that always buys more fabric than the patterns call for, because of these just in case moments, otherwise what would one do?  Still I would prefer to have the spare fabric for some other crafty projects :-) instead of using it all up because of screw ups :-(.