How to create your own bread recipes or alter the recipes you already have
In it's simplest form, bread is only 4 ingredients which are flour, water, salt, and yeast. Regardless of what you do with your bread and any additional ingredients you may or may not add, those few ingredients will be the foundation of your bread. A basic bread recipe has 3 different stages which are fermentation, proofing, and baking. In the fermentation stage you are not trying to form loaves, and are just letting the yeast do its work. Next you divide it into however many portions you like and form the basic structure of your loaf. Then you allow it to proof until it's ready to be baked.
The first thing you'll need is a decent kitchen scale. You can get them on Amazon for $15, and there's a very good reason for having one. If you don't have a set of scales, the only way you can really measure flour with any degree of accuracy is to sift the flour directly into your measuring cup, scrape the top level hoping you don't compress the flour any. If you are lucky, you will get about 120 grams of flour, assuming you are using King Arthur a/p. Other mills might yield different results which is why you have to check with your particular brand of flour. Or you can get a scale. It's much simpler to get a scale, but if you don't, here's how you do it...
http://how2heroes.com/videos/dessert-and-baked-goods/bakers-tip-measuring-flour
Commercial bakers think in terms of baker's percentages and hydration levels. So let's say you want a bread that has a 75% hydration level. For 1000 grams of flour, you would have 750 grams of water. For the sake of simplicity, the amount of salt for 1000 grams of flour is usually going to be 21-22 grams. So right away we already know the amounts of 3 of our 4 ingredients, just by setting our hydration level. One big benefit to precisely measuring your ingredients is if the dough is drier or wetter than you'd like, next time you can simply make adjustments to your hydration level.
The only variable left is yeast. For starting out, I recommend using only instant yeast (if you can find it) or rapid-rise yeast. If your bread recipe has a hydration level of 70% or greater, you can add this yeast directly to your recipe without proofing it. As far as how much yeast you should add, this depends on time and temperature. If you want bread that has a well developed flavor to it, you'll want to add less yeast. Over time, given enough fuel (flour and water), the yeast will repopulate itself. So longer time = less yeast. For some recipes that might take 12-15 hours to ferment and proof, I may only add 1/2 gram of yeast. If I want a quicker bread that is made all in one day, I may use a whole 7g package of instant yeast. You may wish to ferment or proof your dough in the refrigerator. Lower temperatures means it takes more time for the yeast to fully populate, so this factors into how much yeast you should use. As the yeast reproduces, it produces CO2 gas which introduces bubbles into the dough. Usually in the fermentation and proofing stage you are looking for expansion levels of between double and triple which is the point at which the dough will rise no more or not much more. If the dough expands more quickly than you would have liked, you can reduce the amount of yeast next time to compensate (or lower the temperature).
1000g of flour is going to yield about 3lbs of bread, however you choose to break it up. If you want more or less, the metric system makes it easy to scale your recipes up or down. Most whole wheat flours can be substituted directly for white flour. So if I wanted a loaf with 25% rye, I would simply add 250g of rye flour and use 250g less white flour. Different flours behave differently when you're working with them, so you may wish to adjust your hydration levels slightly to compensate. The way to learn is to bake more loaves and see what effect your adjustments have to the final product.
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