Making Stuff and Doing Things: A Collection of DIY Guides to Just About Everything by Kyle Bravo

3.61 AVERAGE

coldinaugust's review

5.0
I've read the whole book, but I'm currently revisiting Matte Resist's articles on gardening. The book is really inspiring, makes you feel like you can DIY too. Great cut & paste zine aesthetic (as most if not all the articles were culled from zines), and a wide variety of stuff. Make your own sex toys. Grow your own food. Ways to catch flies, bind books, play guitar chords, and lots, lots, LOTS more.
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bluejayreads's review against another edition

4.0
informative inspiring fast-paced
 This is more of a reference book than a book you're supposed to read straight through. Personally I think the best way to read it is to skim through it first, then go back and thoroughly read the entries for the projects you're actually interested in doing. 

It's roughly divided into sections by type of project, but all of the content comes from various punk and anarchist zines in the 90s. A lot of the projects are timeless, but some of them are fairly dated (the one turning an 8-track tape into a hidden storage box comes to mind - I don't even know where I would find an 8-track tape in 2021). And some of them didn't seem exactly useful to me, like the one about how to make the socks you wore for a week straight not smell anymore - but that would be more useful to someone in a different situation than me, such as someone who didn't have access to water to wash their socks or who only had one good pair that they needed to wear repeatedly. There were also several sections that fell into the "modern medicine is bad and you should do homeopathy instead" camp, so be aware of that. 

The way to get the most out of this book, I think, is to treat it like a reference book. Read through the sections and projects that interest you. Ignore the rest. Some of them will be useful and some of them won't apply to your situation or won't be interesting to you. Take what you need, and ignore the rest. 
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daeseage's review against another edition

3.5
funny informative fast-paced
Brief overview of a variety of different activities, from making zines to minor electrical repairs, with detours through sexual health and pseudoscientific DIY herbal remedies. The book is a compilation of various DIY zines and the text quality is highly variable and can be difficult to read. It's a good jumping-off point for exploring new things to make and do.