Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills

Over 1,500,000 copies sold—an international bestseller!

NATIONAL BESTSELLER!

#4 BALTIMORE SUN BESTSELLER

#7 AMAZON WEEKLY BESTSELLER

Fully updated—Dye your own wool, raise chickens, make your own cheddar cheese, build a log cabin, and much much more.

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills—the kind employed by our forefathers—and adapt them for a better life in the twenty-first century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide.

Countless readers have turned to Back to Basics for inspiration and instruction, escaping to an era before power saws and fast-food restaurants and rediscovering the pleasures and challenges of a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Now newly updated, the hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations in Back to Basics will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead.

More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers—even if you live in a city apartment, you will find your imagination sparked, and there’s no reason why you can’t, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this may be the most thorough book on voluntary simplicity available.

Abigail R. Gehring is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Homesteading Handbook and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Living. She lives in New York City and Windham, Vermont.