Ultimate Soap Carving

Ultimate Soap Carving by Makiko Sone is a tutorial guide with 25 projects showing how to carve soap into various decorative shapes. Released 26th March 2019 by Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 128 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

As shown on the cover, there are numerous fun small soaps with a surprising amount of detail. The author shows step by step how to proportion and carve all of the different shapes. The first 15% of the page content is given to a thorough introduction of tools and materials including specific appropriate carving tools along with a short safety sub-chapter and extra advice on carving with youngsters.

The second chapter (25% of the content) covers template placement, carving techniques, and some carving lessons which cover the techniques necessary for the project tutorials which come in chapter 3.

The tutorials are arranged roughly in order of difficulty in three sections: easy, intermediate, and advanced. I was surprised how intricate and beautiful the projects are. All of the tutorials are well and clearly photographed.

The end of the book includes all the templates for the projects (as well as a link to printable pdf patterns), along with a short index and author bio.

There just aren't that many carving books out there, and this one is quite good for beginners as well as intermediate learners. The author makes a very good point in the book that the skills learnt by carving soap can also be applied to carving fruits and vegetables decoratively as well as learning to carve harder materials.

Four stars. Well worth a look for the crafty reader.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes