Unless you have someone feeding you the gathered stuff needed to get the crafting materials, you need to buy them, or gather them yourself. Given their cost, gathering them is more likely for most people.

When you are gathering them, you have a choice : spend those gathering tokens on gear, or spend them on Favors to try to gather the hand in items for crafting materials.

IMO it is better to save the crafting tokens for at least the main hand (which should make it far easier to get the folklore RGS items) in one or both miner and botanist .. which leaves you unable to get Favors, and thus unable to get the crafting materials for those almost 6 weeks (for both tools) anyway. Could save those red crafter tokens for when the Favor items become available, but how many materials can you get with your Favors? Maybe it is worth saving the crafter tokens, maybe it is better to get some crafting gear.