level up crafting with leves only?

[Estellios]

It's a bit misleading, but the "Recipes" section of the crafting menu really is for "recently made" recipes (so you can repeat recent crafts more easily) or to look over recipes awarded by turning in leves. There is currently no real recipe book in game, but you can look up recipes at mooglebox.com or http://mozk-tabetai.com/. You can make any recipes that are up to 10 levels above you, no matter if you have actually gotten the recipe or made the item before (so for example, a level 5 weaver can perform any recipe up to level 15). Both websites also give you a list of what any particular recipe an item is used in.

Rule of thumb, though, is not to horde too much. For weaving, yarns, cloths, ingots, and leathers are your "staple" materials. Some recipes require random things like maybe a feather or a rivet but you will save a lot of space if you focus on saving the staple materials and selling the rest that you will not have any immediate use for.

For your straw hat, you can buy Straw from a NPC in Ul'dah (three for a hat). For the Black Dye, you can gather some on Fisher by equipping a Gig tool in your off-hand (you will need the fishing rod to actually change to fisher as well). Black Dye is from spearfishing from any level gathering nodes in the Thanalan (Ul'dah) region, so you can just head out to camp Black Brush, near the pools of water, and clicking on the glowing little orbs coming out of some of the grass there. Spearfishing nodes have a little fish icon on your minimap, don't confuse them with the botanist nodes, which are a little wheat icon.

If you get the dye, you just begin crafting and select the dye along with the hat, your hat will instantly become dyed.