What should I do with lvl 1 gems?

[Rumble]

Just wondering what's the most effective way to get rid of these gems as they're taking up so much space!

[Incunabulum]

2. Quality gems for Gemcutter’s Prism

You know all those spammers who are constantly buying low-quality gems for 1 Alchemy? If you vendor multiple gems with a combined quality of 40% you’ll get back a Gemcutter’s Prism. If you do some simple math with the currency trading ratios you’ll notice that one GCP is worth about 15 Alchemy, so buying 8 gems with 5% +quality each would nearly double your investment.

The simplest solution is to save all +quality gems in your stash until you have enough to sell for a GCP. Anything over 12% +quality can probably be sold for 2-3 GCP to players.

http://www.poepro.net/vendor-recipes/

Recipe: Iron Ring + Skill Gem
Reward: Resistance Ring (red gem = fire, blue gem = frost and green gem = lightning)

Recipe: Amulet + red Gem + blue Gem + green Gem
Reward: "Onyx" Amulet +10-20 to all stats

Recipe: Skill Gem + Orb of Scouring
Reward: Skill Gem will loose a level

http://pathofexilerecipes.blogspot.com/

[JHS_]

- Keep gems that aren't early rewards but are usefull or gems you think you might use to level other toons later. Gems like reduced mana (tho not sure how it is after 2.0) or life leech or faster attack/casting and some auras etc are usefull for almost any class. Later you can either use them yourself or sell to other players
- Keep/sell/vendor recipe quality gems
- Just vendor all junk gems (like any act 1 reward gem that can be muled in few minutes if needed). Theres absolutely no point storing something like fire trap or double strike coz it's reward[pathofexile.gamepedia.com] for one minute job and other is starter gem...

[southcabeza]

I keep 2 of almost every support gem and 1 of every speel/curse etc, any gem with 15+ level get stashed.

[old Charlie]

Another advice i could give you, is to not take rewards you don´t actually need. Just keep the quest pending and get your reward someday in the future, if one of your other characters needs it. This gives you the advantage to be able to choose between a number of skills, instead of cluttering your stash with random skills. After an update with new gems its also an easy way to get some new gems fast and without any grinding.