Do you like boxes? I'm not taking about plain boxes although shoe boxes are nice, and very useful. In the years before I had a career involving a lot of paper and also before I had a filing cabinet, I used shoe boxes. I wrote a guide for an insurance company to help clients keep track of receipts, expenses, insurance, investments, income - all that stuff. I called it The Shoebox Guide and it was very popular because I'm not the only one who stores mementos and other essential files in a shoebox. I save useless boxes, too, until I find a use for them. I have several pretty ones right now, empty but waiting. It bothers me to throw away a paper clip box because they are so cute. They would make lovely dollhouse furniture.

Years ago I made a darling 6-room dollhouse with 3 orange crates as the building, 2 rooms to a box. That was in the days when orange crates were made of wood. It was in the summer and I was visiting my grandparents. I canvassed all my neighbours (mostly relatives) for bits and pieces to help me decorate the rooms: crystal beads for a chandelier, remnants of cloth for upholstery, curtains and carpets and - most useful of all - matchboxes (for wooden) matches, the kind with the sliding sleeve, large enough to make a sofa or a bed for tiny inhabitants. That was long before Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers (1952). When I read that delightful book, and the series that followed , I really empathized with the small creatures and their borrowing habits, adapting odd, small objects to their uses.

The point of my tangent was the box, the match box. Did I mention that I love boxes?

I feel pretty strongly about baskets, too.