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HOME PLAYS FOR LITTLE PEOPLE 7
everything you can lay your hands on is too small. Now is the time to look for boxes—not the carved sandal-wood boxes in which aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth cedar-wood boxes in which uncles buy their cigars, though both these are excellent when you come to the details of your work, but for the mass you want real big boxes. There are the boxes in which starch is packed, and cocoa. The boxes in which your father gets his collars, and the boxes in which your mother gets her chocolates, though not really large, should be collected at the same time, because they need the same treatment.
I am assuming now that you are not building a city for an afternoon's amusement, but one for which you have found a safe resting-place—a city that may take days to build and will not be disturbed for days. If you can once found your city in a safe place, and you are working at it day after day, you will go on thinking of more and more things to be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under your hands as naturally as a flower under the hand of summer.
You have now your collection of boxes—they are of plain, rough wood, and probably disfigured by coarse, colored printed papers telling what the boxes once held. These papers you wash off, and when the boxes are clean and dry, you paint or color them to suit your requirements. Now your requirements are large blocks of color to match bricks, and bricks are of three colors—white, terra-cotta, and stone color.
To Paint Your Houses
To these three I would add a dark brown. Dark wood in a city gives a wonderful richness and helps the lighter colors more than you would think possible. A city in which some buildings are of dark wood will have an air of reality never achieved by a city where all is red or white or stone color.
Your boxes then must be colored either white, red, stone
color, or dark brown. In the white use either white paint—
flat, not shining, or if that cost too much trouble and money,
whitewash made of whitening, size, hot water, and a pinch of
yellow ochre or chrome powder to give it a pleasant ivory i |
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