Country Living Handmade Soaps Recipes for Crafting Soap at Home

This is one of my favorite soap making books! The recipes are great! Although I've never done any of the hand milled ones, since I'd had trouble doing that with other recipes. The recipes make great hard bars of soap! Highly recommended!

My first batch of soap was from the basic #4 recipe in this book. It came out great. It made nice hard bars with a good lather and excellent cleaning properties. Though this is not the "end all, be all" of soap books, it is very good. The only caveat is that the recipes with frangrances or essential oils are a bit heavy on the nose. I recommend halving the essential oil requirements to achive a soap that isn't overpowering. This is a book for the beginner and is not technichal in nature. Professional soapmakers should look elswhere for comprhensive lists of what can go wrong and how to fix it. Most recipes here make a two to three pound batch, which hardly qualifies as huge quantities. I recommend this book to any beginners out there who just want to get started without becoming master soapmakers on the first go.

This is the book that taught me to make cold process soap. It contains enough information to be instructional without being intimidating. The text is well-written and the pictures are lovely, and there are brief instructions for melt & pour soaps and some other toiletries as well. I have made several batches of cold process soap using the recipes from this book, and all have turned out wonderfully. This book should be in every soapmaker's library.

This beautifully illustrated book is an excellent resource for both the beginner and the experienced soapmaker. Recipes are easy to follow and produce a great finished product. The book also contains recipes for bath salts, shampoos and laundry soaps; and comes complete with a resource guide.I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the art of soapmaking