OK. First, decide what you want to make and find that station. Lets pick something easy and useful like food/drink. You'll need a few things first so hit the "B" key, (or is it the "N" key?), to bring up your recipe book.
Find the recipe for black coffee and the one for sunfish rolls, those are the ones you'll make to get started. As you will see, you'll need fish & dough & fuel to make the fish rolls and you'll need coffee & water & more fuel to make the coffee. (You'll also need the fish and the coffee which can both be harvested on the island.) Buy enough water, dough and fuel from the vendor to cover what you have harvested.
Now, before you begin to craft, hit the "K" key and open your knowledge book. Choose the crafting tab and look for the three spell buffs that are associated with cooking (artistry). You can right click and examine them to see what they are all used for.
When you have found the three you need, open up a empty new hot bar and drag the three spell icons down into the new bar.
Now you're ready to make some food and drink!
Right click on the stove and choose "create" - not examine.
Pick the recipe you want from the list, highlight it and hit the button that says "create". you should now see a screen that shows the ingredients you are about to use and what you are going to make.
Hit "begin" and you're off and running!
As the crafting process begins you will see another screen that shows 4 green bars above 4 empty bars. The green bars are the items durability and the empty ones are where you will see your progress in the combine. This progress will show up as blue bars below the green ones.
Whenever you see an icon pop up in the crafting window, match it to one of the 3 you pulled into the new hot bar and click that icon. This is known as "countering an event" and is a good thing. In addition, every 4 or 5 seconds you can click 2 or 3 of those same "buff" icons and increase your progress in the combine.
You will notice that as the combine progresses, the bottom green bar will start to disappear - moving to the left and leaving empty space. If you lose an entire green bar, the item you are crafting will drop in quality level but don't worry too much about that now.
When you have completed 4 blue bars of progress the combine will end and you will have a new item in your inventory. YOu can also stop the combine manually by hitting the stop button anytime you like.
And that's basically it... just rinse and repeat till you have made all the stuff you need.
Have fun!!!