Bezier pen on, Spiro tab on, Triangle in turned on, When I pull a flourish, the line is very thin. When I turn on the "path effects", power stroke will be turned on automatically. When I add "pattern along path", and click stoke width box. it has no effect on the very thin line. I've watch videos to increase the stroke effect. I want to note that the path effect editor is different from all the videos. Is there a default setting I'm missing. By the way I'm using version .91.

I think the problem you're running into, is that the Powerstroke is a new LPE in version 0.91. Likely most, if not all tutorials are written before o.91. And another change that was made, is the two triangle shape options on both the Pen and Pencil control bars now have Powerstroke automatically applied. Before, they had Pattern Along Path automatically applied, and that's likely what you're seeing in the tutorials (although that's a guess on my part, since you didn't link to any of the tutorials you used).

I don't think there's any reason to have both Powerstroke and PAP applied to the same path. Hhmmm....actually that might solve a problem I've been thinking about.... So maybe it is possible. But for now, remove the PAP from the path where Powerstroke has been applied.

After you draw a path with Pen or Pencil using one of the Triangle shape options, switch to the Node tool. Then you may or may not need to zoom in, to look for 2 or 3 pink nodes. In my experience, these are very hard to notice, because it's pale pink. (If they were to make those nodes darker pink, I think would help.) Also, on either end of the path, the pink node might be overlapping with the regular nodes. So zooming is encouraged.

And then you just drag the pink nodes, to make the path wider/narrower.

You got it right . If you pick on the base of the flourish node and pull it to the side, the base stem will thicken. Thank you.