Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life

Jenna Woginrich started this project with admiration for small farmers and frustration with a consumeristic world that moves too fast and creates too much waste. Woginrich reasoned that learning a few basic country skills and ditching consumer culture could take her back to a simpler time, with simple pleasures like eating vegetables and wearing clothes you've grown and made yourself. This book is the account of Woginrich's journey, and a call for the reader to take up the same DIY mantle. Learn how to take care of your own needs and extricate yourself from the web of consumerism with this guide to homesteading and account of one woman's experience of leaving the fast-paced world behind. No matter where you live or how much experience or knowledge you have, it is possible to make yourself a little more self-sufficient.

Designed + Produced in Portland, Oregon
* Woman Owned Business

Portland's most colorful, authentic, and empowering publishing house and distributor, Microcosm Publishing equips readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice.Microcosm has lived in milk crates, in closets, in a mud room, in a windowless basement, in a church, and under a desk at a major credit card company. We've brought our brightly colored books to infoshops, zine fests, media summits, bicycle conferences, parks, street corners, house shows, dirty bars, all­night coffeeshops, art museums, and every corner of the mainstream where we can clear away a little space to set up shop. We set out to save ourselves from not caring, but out there in the margins we've found communities worth always doing it better for. Now we have contracts instead of handshakes, a warehouse instead of a fanny pack full of zines. We have a staff, we have relationships in the industry that send our books to places we wouldn't have dreamed we could walk into ourselves. We're not as drunk or dirty as we used to be. But still, at heart, we've got this milk crate strapped to the back of a bike and we're riding wildly across town to hand you the book that might just be the one that saves your life!