Block Project - Block 4 - Washington's Puzzle

Since I've been following along in Jinny Beyer's The Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns, some of you may have wondered what happened to block number 2.  Today's block is block number 2 on page 56 and it isn't quite as straight forward as the other blocks I've posted.

I'm easily able to use templates to create a block, but I was curious if I could come up with a method of cutting this block without using templates.  I knew that because of the odd shapes I couldn't just add the regular 1/4 inch for the seam allowance.  I had once seen an episode of Fon's and Porter where they pieced a star by cutting two fabric squares stacked which makes two blocks at once.  So I thought I'd try my hand at that.

First I stacked two squares of fabric and cut them apart in the block design:

I then went about piecing the blocks until I had two finished blocks:

At a glance, the blocks look right, but when you compare the block to the original drawing, the sizing is not correct.  I tried various sizes of squares and none of them worked out correctly.  Though one bonus of doing these blocks was finding out the pattern made by the two opposite colored blocks when places side by side:

So, since this didn't work as expected, I knew I had to go back to templates.  Although I could easily have machine pieced the block, I am also a fan of hand piecing.  I chose to do my templates on freezer paper and here is the block cut out using the freezer paper templates:

Since I was hand piecing, I didn't really care about being exact on the seam allowance.  Here's the block with each row finished:

Here is the block after joining the rows:

Here's the completed block before I squared up the seam allowance:

And here's the completed and squared up block: