In Rift's case, though, there were so many stacks of soft leather on my local auction house that it was a borderline call whether to risk the deposit fee for the chance at selling marginally over vendor price. So, I took my mage alt and turned them into an outfitter.
Basics of Rift Crafting
Outfitters, like EQ2 Tailors, do cloth and leather armor, along with bags. Cloth drops from humanoids and leather is skinned from mobs using butchering (also sometimes yields bones, which I haven't needed yet). This leaves you with an empty third slot, which I'm using for mining on the alt, while my main remains a triple gatherer. (Runecrafting, Rift's equivalent of WoW's enchanting profession, is another common choice since it does not require a gathering profession.)
Once you get the materials, the actual making of items is like we have in WoW or LOTRO - stand by the tool (e.g. a loom), click the button, watch the progress bar. There are optional enhancement items, which drop from rifts, and are used to add an additional stat to the item you're crafting. Crafting the base item cannot fail, but the attempt to add the enhancement might - if this happens, the enhancement item is destroyed but you do not lose the other materials, so you'll always be able to make the base gear if you run out of enhancement items or give up.
Sinking the skillup items
Interestingly, Rift offers two ways to dispose of the crafted items you make for skill points.
First, my outfitter can salvage armor, including stuff I just crafted, for some crafting materials (and a special "salvaged cloth/leather" that is used in some side recipes).
Second, there is a daily quest for each tier of crafting, where you turn in some number of a basic crafted item in exchange for small amounts of exp and special tokens that are used at recipe vendors in your capital city. These crafting quests appear to be the only way to earn these tokens, and the higher level recipes cost hundreds of them, so dedicated crafters are going to want to do these as often as possible.
In principle, this should create a natural sink of these materials out of the economy. (In fact, that might be the problem with the soft leather - the outfitter dailies don't use any of it.) You might even be able to craft these items for skill points and sell them on the auction house (if you don't want the tokens for yourself) to high level crafters who want to get their tokens quickly.
Unfortunately, I don't see a huge reason why it's important for me to do my own crafting. It's useful to have a low level outfitter on my account just so my future alts (well, 1-2 more since I now already have two of the four callings) can ship their cloth over in exchange for bags. That convenience aside, it doesn't look like there are self-only perks or significant amounts of crafter-only content (as in EQ2). I'm not convinced that it's worth the trouble compared to farming for the auction house.