The basics of Spellcrafting:
Spellcrafting is the ability to put bonus's on player crafted items.  You have 4 slots on each item made to be able to imbue 4 different gems.  This allows you to bring your resists, skills, hits, stats and power up.  The quality of the item determins the amount of "points" you can imbue in an item.  The gems quality and level determine the "points" they will take up when doing an imbue.  The highest quality item at level 51 will allow you 32 points to spend in imbueing an item. You can however overcharge an item by a maximum of 5.5 points, allowing you a total of 37.5 imbue points.  (see overcharge below).

Overcharge:
To do this however you need to have 98% or higher on 2 of the gems and 99% or higher on the other 2 gems and usally a 99% or 100% quality item.  For each over charge point you put on an item you have a chance to blow the item up and destroy it and the gems.  One factor in doing an over charge is you need to have all 4 gems slots filled or it will more than likely blow up.  The unfilled gem slots are treated as 94% quality slots even though they do not exist.

What do you want crafted?:
This is by far the biggest question. Knowing what you want in an item to be crafted can speed up this process. It's best to know what you have currently and what you could use as improvement. There are maximums to all the abilities and how much you can put into them.  Then you have plus to caps that increase your maximum. You don't want to waste points in crafting if you are allready at your max benifit.

More of what you need to know:
There are many things you can do with crafting and many opinions of what you should do.  If you would like help please feel free to email me eethan@misunderstood.us. Also check out the links to the side for Kort's spellcrafting calc, and Whiteluric's Guide to *Getting* SC'ed, (a little more indepth about spellcrafting).

Thanks

Eethan/Nibon -- LGM Spellcrafter