This article concerns a central issue in education as an institutional activity: instructions and their role in guiding student activities and understanding. In the study, we investigate the tensions between specifics and generalities in the joint production of guided action. This issue is explored in the context of handicraft education--or more specifically, a teacher education program in sloyd. Handicraft is particularly interesting when analysing instructions, since the purposes of instructions are often dual: (1) to bring about a broad, instructionally relevant mode of understanding artefacts (including their origin, aesthetics, etc.), and (2) to guide manual action in the production of such artefacts. In the article, a detailed analysis of an instructional sequence, which includes the production of two distinct types of embroideries, is reported. The analysis sheds light on the role of educational examples in sloyd as well as on the related issue concerning the distinctive difference between the activities of listening to instructions as part of a lecture, on the one hand, and, on the other, listening to instructions in order to be able to accomplish a task. (Contains 2 figures, 6 footnotes and 7 excerpts.)