How do you get better at crafting? (and a few more questions)

[Niwashi]

At level 4 you don't have many of your skills yet. Essentially, "Synthesis" skills ("Basic Synthesis" for now, but you'll get some additional ones later) increase your Progress bar, while "Touch" skills increase your Quality bar. I believe your first Touch skill comes at level 5, so until then you cannot create High Quality results. (EDIT: Well, I guess it still is possible to have High Quality results occur. Using HQ ingredients gives you a bit of initial Quality, so if the RNG is in your favor, you might get lucky and have a HQ item result. But you can't do much to influence that until you get Touch skills. Eventually, you're going to want to use Touch skills to fill the Quality bar all the way to 100%, where you get a guaranteed HQ result.)

Eventually, you'll also start getting some skills that will restore some of the Durability you've already used up, providing more chances to use those Touch and Synthesis skills. (The first of those, Master's Mend, is unlocked at level 7, though it's rather costly in Crafting Points until you get a bit further). Then there's skills to improve your success chances with your Synth/Touch skills, skills that restore Crafting Points, and so on.

The Durability on a recipe (in combination with the number of Durability-restoring skills you have available) determines how many times you can use Synth and Touch skills. You need enough successful Synth skills to complete the recipe before your Durability runs out. If you have enough durability that you can do more than that, you want all the extra durability to go towards Touch skills to improve Quality as far as you can (and that part needs to be done before your final Synth skill that finishes your Progress bar).

At your current level, where Basic Synthesis is all you're using, I'm guessing it probably failed a few times for your synthesis to have failed. It'll take a few more levels before you can do anything about that. There's a Steady Hand skill you'll get at level 9 that improves your chances for success (though still doesn't guarantee it). And if you level Weaver as well, its level 15 skill, Careful Synthesis, always succeeds, and is available to use as a cross-class skill for all your other DoH classes. (It doesn't improve Progress quite as far as Basic Synthesis does, but it's worth it for the assurance that it will work when you need it to. Extremely useful skill to get.)

Basically, at this point, you just need to keep going a bit further until you get enough skills to have better control over your results.