The first stage of crafting is gathering materials, and it is very slow. Here are three methods for getting a gathering skill up to where it's more 3..5..2..7 ish:
1) Hunt maggots, and consume the crystals that they drop. Esp. good for the first half-dozen levels of a crafting school.

2) Buy and use reaping potions (good for 25-50 points of skill). Difficult to find for sale, however.

3) Make or buy yourself customized gear that boosts your gathering skill. You can raise your crafting skill about 60 points with first-tier customized gear.

It takes a little less than 3 hours to get mining skill from 0 to 130-ish, starting from scratch:

-- 15 minutes to hunt maggots, for enough crystals to get the Miner school to level 6
-- 1 hour to hunt Cedar Treant Saplings (level 7), to get their Cedar Treant Sapling Limbs, the technique component used to make Mining gear.
-- the rest of the time to run around gather materials, buy the formulas for the equipment, and get to player-made crafting stations to scribe formulas and craft the mining teched gear.

A gathering skill boost can be put on 4 pieces of armor, 5 pieces of jewelry, the gathering tool, and a sack. In addition, a 'boon' boost can be put on 5 more equipment pieces (3x armor + 2x jewelry), for a total of 59 skill points. The quartermaster in Sslanis sells the technique for the gathering/crafting skills, but the boon techniques are dropped by humanoid monsters. Players in the Marketplace chat will often be willing to craft the gear for you, if you have all the components (which is very helpful if the trip to Sslanis is still too difficult).

For the monster components, here's what to hunt:
Mining Cedar Treant Saplings
Quarrying Enraged Dim Wisps
Fishing Small Loricatus Beetles

and less useful (because they're higher level, in the teens)
Foraging Venomous Stalker Aggressor
Essence Harvesting Agh'kuk Warrior
Logging Bronze Boulder Golem