My advice is if you're taking up crafting is to take advantage of leves. They give you a ton of shards and free materials. As far as making your own gear, since you are a returning player I'm going to assume you might be using an outdated database. Crafting got revamped a while back and everything is a LOT easier to make. You might not be able to gather or make all the materials for something you want to craft, but if you look in the wards or check out NPCs, low level materials are quite affordable and available.

Mooglebox.com is one of the more commonly used sites. Looking at that, it looks like you are able to purchase materials for a Level 21 set of gear for around 8-13k for a single piece of gear. That should be affordable for a low level player if you do leves (and the evaluations after clearing 8 of them) and selling your drops. Also, if you do take up crafting, you yourself are proof that there is a market for these items so you can make a few pieces to sell (although remember extremely overpriced, 100k gear won't sell =P)

Even if you don't have a craft leveled up, if you use the Auto-translate there is a good chance you will be able to shout and have someone craft it for you for no charge.

You can also take Eden Archangel up on his offer =)