I've noticed that the only items available for crafting at the first level of armor crafting are copper shields. Why no copper armors?
It seems to me that this would be a good thing to do, given the prices for medium and heavy copper armors at the NPC merchants. Crafting them would give beginning crafters a little variety in their work and give new players a chance to buy their first suit of metal armor at a better price. As it is now, Gretchen has to strip-mine the Red Light Caverns and use all of the copper to make bucklers in an effort to get past level 1.