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The two best shortcuts if you have some gold (10-15K) both involve deconstruction.
Purchase all the green and higher armor of the type you want to level (light, medium or heavy) you can find in your guild stores or from guild kiosks at the lowest reasonable cost and deconstruct them. The higher the item level the better.
Or find a deconstruction partner and make as many of the highest material item you can work with, and trade them with your partner to deconstruct. An alternative is to give your partner the mats and have them create the items and return them to you to deconstruct. These methods help level both of you together.
You can also do the same trading thing with one of your own alts. Create on one alt and deconstruct with your main armor crafter. This is a bit more trouble because you have to find a way to move the items from alt to alt, since you can't mail stuff to yourself.
Items made by another crafter do give more inspiration, therefore you will level it faster. However, unless you are trading items back and forth with someone of the same level, this will get expensive fast.
I have 4 Vet level characters. My main is V12 and the others are V11, V5 and V1.
My crafter is the V1 toon and after the last main patch when it became clear that deconstructing material that is a higher level than you doesn't give the best materials back, I decided to have my main level up BS/WW/Cloth for deconstruction purposes only, not crafting.
I put three points into the deconstruction passive of each trade and it took about 10 days to get to level 50 in each trade by deconstructing all the drops from my other 3 Vet toons. Now my main is the only one that deconstructs and my V1 crafter does material refinement and crafting.