Today, on the Rex Parker Does the . . . blog, @Ellen S said:

. . . I want to talk about Questinia's bread recipe! I made it last week. What a HOOT! 
Her recipe said:
Mix 3 1/2 C warm H2O with 1 TB yeast and 1 TB salt.
Stir in about 6 C flour until no lumps.
Dough will be wet. Let rise an hour or so.
Form as baguettes or boules, let rise additional 15 mins or so.
Bake in quick oven. (that’s 400 degrees. Or 500 degrees – if 500, “15-25 minutes”. Hah.)
Also useful as a pizza dough.

That turned out to be "about" 2# of flour = one bag from Sprouts. And exactly one packet of Active Dry Yeast. So measuring was sure simple. But I used whole wheat flour which might have messed up the whole process. I also didn't let it rise long enough, let it raise another time, maybe a few other things I should have done or not done. But the amazing thing is, I did everything wrong and it still tasted great. I'll play around and let you know if I can get a version that shapes into baguettes. 

I've been baking bread  every three or four days now for the past three or four months. I'm still seeking the perfect baguette or batard or boule. Lately I'm happier with my results than I have been.

The bread I baked today.

Some background: In the late 70s when I worked for the Living History Center, the creator of the Renaissance Pleasure Faires and the Dickens Fair in California, I lived with the family of a woman who, among other things, researched and prepared meals from the renaissance period. Every day or so, she would dip her hands into the steel garbage can she kept her flour in and pull out a few double hands full of flour and dump it into a wooden bowl she kept on the table, she'd add water, salt, sugar or honey, and yeast and mix it all up with her hands. She'd knead it for a bit then leave it alone for a while. She'd go back and do things to it every now and again and, after a few hours there would be the wonderful smell of bread baking. Here's the point: bread is a very forgiving thing to make. One can make a lot of mistakes and still get good tasting bread. You need only look at the various recipes for bread that can be found in books or on the internet to realize that there are innumerable variations that will all produce decent bread.

Now, as to Questinia's recipe. To me, that seems like far too much water for that amount of flour. My renaissance friend told me and many many recipes confirm that a good rule of thumb is two cups of water to six cups of flour. A more hydrated dough will produce bigger baguette-like holes in the crumb but a more hydrated dough would come from more like 5 1/2 cups of flour instead of six and that is going to depend on the humidity in your kitchen.

I weigh my flour for accuracy and use grams because I only have an electronic postal scale. I regard one cup of flour as 110 grams and use 660 grams of flour to make two medium baguettes/batards. You used just over 900 grams and I don't think that was even enough. Next, you used whole wheat flour. Because of the germ and other stuff in whole wheat that white flour doesn't have, whole wheat won't rise as much as white flour. I don't remember the exact reason, but that's the gist.

I've been using the recipe for hearth bread from the King Arthur Flour website. I've varied it slightly here and there, mostly in method but occasionally in the sweetening, using honey, syrup, and brown sugar. I've only noticed a significant difference in taste the one time I forgot to add salt. I bought sourdough starter from KAF and went through all of that process and made a couple of loaves but the result was nowhere near what I, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, would regard as sourdough bread. If I really really want that, I can have it shipped to me. So, to me, sourdough isn't worth the effort required to make it just to save the cost of a packet of yeast.

I use KAF bread flour and would recommend it. I tried using all purpose flour and whole wheat flour but prefer the bread flour. It has more protein and seems to set up better for me.

There is something amazing about doing something humans have been doing for ten thousand years. Bread and beer go hand in hand and it can be argued beer brewing and bread baking developed side by side. No, I don't grind my own wheat but it's magical to take flour and turn that white powder into food. And what wonderful food it is. The Roman army marched on it. A pound of bread per day for each soldier and, if he was lucky, some olive oil to dip it in. Baking bread speaks to me in a primal way. It connects me to my neolithic farming ancestors and all the others through the ages.

My renaissance friend tells a story of her great grandmother baking bread by a camp fire in the morning after it had risen overnight. She then set more dough to rise through the day as she walked beside her covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Nobody rode the wagons as the added weight taxed the oxen. That night, she baked more bread and then delivered a son. She was hiking again the next day. He got to ride, at least some of the time, in the wagon.

Bread permeates our history as human beings. I hope I'm not preaching to the choir. All of this assumes you are not a seasoned baker. Continuing that assumption, I hope you continue your adventure into bread baking. I'll offer this little bit of advice: find a recipe that suits you and keep with it until you get the results you desire. I can't think of much that's more rewarding than creating food from bland powder except occasionally giving a loaf to a friend or neighbor.