Piecing diamonds tutorial - the true hollywood story

I have shown a few peeks of a project I am currently working on that involves piecing diamonds. I have run into several issues while working on this and I haven't been able to find any tutorials to help me fix them! This made me realize that most patterns/tutorials/techniques show everything going great, and at the end of it you have a perfect product! Well, how often does THAT actually happen?? There don't seem to be any that are like, "Well, you sure messed that up, but here's how you can fudge it and make it work." I'm not aiming for mediocrity here, just admitting publicly that it's okay for projects to not be PERFECT - they are made by humans after all, right?

So I decided I'm going to show what happened to me, and hopefully it will help someone else to avoid similar problems. I think this will be a 2-3-part post since there are issues at every freaking step of the way!

I wish I could say that I know the outcome will be perfect, but since this is a work in progress (as all of quilting - and life I suppose - is) we'll just have to see. The whole point of this anyway, is about how to make something that's not perfect into something that will be loved for years to come. You know how I am about the relationships I develop with quilts. I'm committed to making it through this rough patch. I hope this will help someone else's quilt-love troubles too!

Thanks for looking!