Yes, you can do the initial glamour-crafting quest as any 50 crafter, since it's just limited to DoH. Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring other crafters to 30 =/ Despite being level 30 recipes, you need the crafter at 50 to be able to read the relevant book -_- Apparently crafters don't know how to read until then. Learned that myself the hard way and had to lug around with three books in my inventory until I levelled up those crafters.
As for levelling, Ixali beast tribes makes it a lot faster to level to 50, since you get all those quest exp on crafting classes. Leves are good too, but some are more costly than it's worth. Same with Grand Company hand-ins -- personally I bought stuff off the market board when they were cheap, but if money is an issue for you, it'd probably be better to craft them (unless you really find them dirt cheap, like 500gil or something -- sometimes you're lucky and get unwanted items). I'd advise you to pick up all crafting classes and check the GC handin list daily -- if one of them has a star in front, it means you get twice the normal exp for handing in that item. And if you hand in a high-quality item, the listed exp number is doubled.
XIV Guild has pretty good crafting levelling guides that could help you level crafters, here's the link to leatherworker as an example, but at the top there's a dropdown list for crafting so you can pick the crafting profession you're most interested in.
It can be tricky to grind money before you figure out what works for you. I wish you the best of luck, OP =D
