Author: Raleigh Briggs
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Genre: How-To
Pages: 10 pages

Raleigh Briggs is a cheerful and charming writer and I recommend picking up her heftier Make Your Place, which is a useful guide on crafting nontoxic variations of household cleaners and other ubiquitous dangers.

Soap was left out of Make Your Place because it’s inherently toxic – the main ingredient is almost always the caustic alkaline compound sodium hydroxide or lye (as I learned from the zine). The instructions here emphasize safety but I’d imagine this would appeal to only the most hardcore DIY folks who are also very much into personal hygiene (a thin sliver in that Venn diagram, to be sure).

While the instructions are clear and well-written, a zine doesn’t seem to be the best delivery for this information. At only a handful of pages, couldn’t this have just been posted online? Would someone really seek out or wait by the mailbox for a week for something this slight? It’s like printing a cooking zine that only contains three recipes.

Bottom Line: Good info for your clean DIYer who doesn’t have an internet connection.
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