Material Required for Making a Boxville Store: one shoe-box with two shoe-box covers, two long pencils, two spools, waxed paper, and small boxes.

The village store of Boxville is made from a shoe-box. One shoe-box cover makes the porch it rests upon. Another forms the roof of the store.

If you wish to make a village store, also, place a shoe-box upon its side, and then the bottom of the box will become the front of your store.

You will need to have a large shop window in front. Make this first. Two inches from the right-hand end of the box, mark with your pencil a wide oblong space five inches by three. Cut out this window space on all four sides. (For cutting a window space, see Diagram One, A, page 166.)

Cut a piece of waxed paper a little larger than the size of your window. Paste this inside the box building over the window space to make glass. Cut strips of pinwheel paper and paste them around the window on the outside of the box to make window-casings.

Now you are ready to make a door for your store. Draw a door space on your box with your pencil. Make it two inches from the left-hand end of the box. Make it four inches high and two inches wide. (To cut single door, see Diagram Two, A, page 167.) Cut across the top line, down the side line that is next the window, and across the base. When you bend the cardboard you have cut, you will have a door that will open and close. Color the door, if you like. It may be painted brown.

After this, you are ready to place the roof on your store; but first, lay one of the box covers upon its rims on your work-table and put the little store upon it, well back, so there will be a porch in front. Then, take your other shoe-box cover and fit it over the top of the box building so that it projects over the porch in front. Two long pencils, with ends run into the openings of two spools, make pillars to place at either corner of the porch.

The step up to the porch is any small box you may have.

Inside the store, a long hat-pin box makes a counter. Flowers, leaves, pretty pebbles, shells, and little toys such as you may find among your own playthings may be displayed upon the counter.

A roly-poly tumble toy will make a clerk for the store, or, if you like, you may find both clerk and customers in magazine pictures, and you can mount them on thin cardboard and cut them out. There is no end to the plays you can invent when your store is finished. Polly Ann of shoe-box cottage, Boxville, has just come to the store to buy a loaf of bread. There it is—that pretty brown pebble! Those green leaves are vegetables! The beads in that box are apples! The shells are little cakes!