It's hard to tell without seeing your code, but the NullPointerException at line 22 of your TutorialMod class might be because you are trying to do something with an object variable you haven't assigned a value to. That is, you've declared it's type and given it a name (eg "Item myItem;"), but you haven't done an assignment (with the = operator) to it by line 22 yet.
One way this can happen is if you try to use your Item or Block in a Recipe, but you haven't created it and registered it with GameRegistry. Create Items and Blocks in preInit(FMLPreInitializationEvent event) to make sure they get created and loaded first. Then create Recipes in init(FMLInitializationEvent event) to keep that from happening.
