Oops!

     It is not in my makeup to do things by the book.  When I cook, I look at my ingredients and see what needs to be used, and put those into whatever I am making.  For instance, if I see insufficient applesauce for parceling out at dinner, I might dump it into cookies.  My regular cookies are called "this and that".  I take a bit of this and a bit of that and mix them together, then add whatever I think the batter needs to bake into cookies.
     I do the same with meals.  I look at cookbooks to get ideas and hints as to proper proportions, then substitute freely.  Once a recipe turned out to be something wonderful, and I went to copy it into my personal file.  I had substituted every ingredient for something the original specified.
     When I am learning a new skill from a book, I should stick to the facts.  I don't.  I question every sentence.  Why is this step necessary?  If I cannot see any reason, I eliminate the step.  Sometimes this works.  Often, it does not.  The first time I measured warp for multiple projects, I could not see a reason for maintaining a cross to keep the threads in order.  After all, they were all the same color, all the same length, why did it matter which came first?  I ended up with a tangled mess.  I had to lay out 360 threads, each six yards long, on my living room floor, untangle them, and rebuild the cross.  And I had to do it quickly, as several people and four dogs were regularly crossing said floor.
     Now I know better than to do that particular thing.  But I still look at what is prescribed, and choose another color, another structure, a different sett, vary the treadling and end up with something which bears no resemblance to the  project I am "copying".  Oops.