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With a smile, Louise Cohen answered her dinner guest, "I made them. And I'm awfully glad you like them. I had such fun making them for tonight."

When Louise and her husband, Richard, finished remodeling an old house in Cheviot Hills, California, they planned this dinner party. It was a celebration. Louise wanted everything just right. She knew how the dining table was going to look: What cloth she would use and what flower arrangement.

Then she thought how nice it would be to have individual match boxes at each plate. Something the guests could take home. And she wanted something that would match the wallpaper in the dining room and blend well with her maple furniture. She didn't dream she wouldn't be able to find that sort of match boxes.

Her quest took her from gift shop to stationery store to department store. No one had any match boxes that were unusual or attractive. There was nothing that even remotely resembled her dining room paper.

"By then," Mrs. Cohen recalls, "the idea of the boxes was so firmly fixed in my mind, I just had to have them. So I decided to make them myself."

WITH AN assortment of wallpaper scraps left from the papering job, Mrs. Cohen went to work. She bought some penny match boxes, cut the paper to size and glued it to the box. This looked attractive but there was a little something lacking. So Louise started rummaging around and found an old beaded bag. She thought the tiny, tiny beads, when glued to the box, would make it much more attractive.

When she finished, the boxes looked lovely. They were carefully put away, but when she took them out a few days before the party, she found most of the beads had fallen off.

Her husband knew how disappointed she was and he suggested that she use flitter instead of beads.

"What's flitter?" Mrs. Cohen asked. "I've never heard of that."

Her husband explained that it is ground glass and is used by sign painters for show cards. It is brilliant and sparkling and comes in many different colors. It is sprinkled on and its sparkle brings out the lettering, figures or whatever the sign painter wants to accentuate.

Louise thought the flitter would be a good idea, so the next day she visited a sign painter's supply house and came home with boxes in all different colors.

Even though the beads had fallen off, the wallpaper was still glued tightly to the match boxes. Much to her delight, Mrs. Cohen found the flitter much easier to use than beads and the result was more than she had hoped for. The boxes resembled small jeweled cases, a far cry from an ordinary penny match box.

"I was definitely flattered to think my boxes caused so much comment the night of the party," Mrs. Cohen says. "But when the men had me in business, I laughed it off. I told them that I had entirely too much to do with keeping this house and taking care of Janet, our four-year-old daughter. But for a hobby, it was great. I could work an hour, fifteen minutes or all morning and really find relaxation."

MRS. COHEN kept making the boxes and gave them away as gifts and canasta prizes. Her friends were always so pleased to get them as gifts and she liked to make them so well, she at last decided maybe she would try to sell some of them.

She wrapped her boxes in Cellophane, three to a package, sealed them with Scotch tape and started out.

"I had never sold anything in my life," she recalls. "I was simply frightened to death. But I thought I might as well start at the top. So I went to the gift shop buyer at Bullock's Westwood Village store and showed her my samples. She liked them and said she would take a gross if I could deliver them in three days.

"I felt awfully stupid, but I had to ask her how many boxes were in a gross. When she told me 144, I relaxed, because I knew I had that many already made. And because she was so pleasant and so interested in my work, I found the courage to contact other buyers."

That was in May, 1951. Since that time Louise Cohen has sold over 15,000 match boxes. She has them in such stores as Bullock's Los Angeles, Pasadena and Westwood; the Paper Shop at the famous Farmer's Market in Hollywood; the Brentwood Country Mart in exclusive Brentwood, California; Bloomingdale's in New York and stores in Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Boston.

Wherever her matches are sold, there is a small display card on the counter reading, "Hand Made by Louise of California." Each package of matches carries a sticker saying, "Made in California. Permanent finish. May be refilled."

ACCORDING TO Mrs. Cohen, making the boxes is a simple process. It is the selling that takes the time. Buyers are busy people and it usually means giving up a whole morning to stand in line and wait your turn to confer with one. She also writes innumerable letters to buyers and heads of departments in stores throughout the country who don't have resident buyers in the Los Angeles area.

She tells this amusing story about her experience with the buyer at the Los Angeles May Company:

"The buyer had one hour a day, from 9 to 10 o'clock in the morning, when she looked at samples. Any housewife knows what it means to be out of the house and downtown by 9 o'clock. It takes a little doing.

"But that morning I made it. My mother was there to stay with the baby, everything had been well planned the night before and I was riding to town with my husband. He pulled up in front of the store with a flourish, I stepped out of the car and realized—I had left my box of samples at home. It was 8:30 and I lived fifteen miles away through early morning city traffic.

"I hardly dared look at my husband, but he very calmly told me to get back in the car. We stopped at a telephone and I called my mother, telling her to pick up the box and what street to take. We took the same street going one way, mother another. We met, I grabbed the box, Richard did a fast turn around the block and we were on our way again.

"I got back to the May Company at 9 o'clock. The buyer was out of town that day!"

Mrs. Cohen thinks one reason she has been successful in selling her boxes is because of the price. She sells them for $7.20 a dozen, or 15 cents a box. Not counting her labor, it costs her about 7 cents to make a box. She now sells them in packages of four with one refill. The store buys a package for 60 cents, selling it for $1.

"These days you can't buy much for $1," Mrs. Cohen says. "But women like them for an inexpensive gift, for bridge prizes, dinner parties or luncheons. And the boxes add a useful and decorative bit of color to coffee tables and occasional tables around the house."

MRS. COHEN'S workshop is the basement of her home. Her husband fixed a work table for her out of their discarded front door. Covered with an old army blanket, it makes a perfect place for her to spread the materials. The small pieces of wallpaper are stacked neatly on shelves in front of her, different colors of flitter in open boxes on the table within easy reach. For $8 she bought an electric heat sealer which seals the Cellophane on the packages and makes a professional looking job.

For a while, Louise cut the wallpaper herself, but found it took too much time. She now has it cut to size at a print shop and pays $4 for the cutting of 5,000 pieces.

She selects her wallpaper with care. It has to be a paper with a small design, preferably a floral, small checks or an all over small pattern. One roll of paper, when cut, will produce many different patterns and 625 pieces.

Mrs. Cohen pays an average of $3 a roll for her paper and buys it wholesale. She usually buys five double rolls at a time.

With a small artists' brush, she applies glue to her match box. Then she puts on the paper. To speed up production, she usually puts paper on a number of boxes in one day. The next day she applies her flitter and the next day shellacks the boxes to give them the permanent finish.

WHEN LOUISE is ready to apply the flitter, she studies the design of the paper and decides what colors she is going to use and what part of the design she wants to bring out. For example, she may have a paper with a white background with a small blue flower and red roses. There are green leaves with darker green stems. In the center of the blue flower she puts a small amount of glue, then paints the roses and stems with glue. She sprinkles lime colored flitter in the center of the blue flower, puts red on the roses and green on the stems. With a light stroke of her hand, she brushes off the surplus.

From the same roll of paper, she may have a piece of paper with the white background, but only the long green stems and leaves predominating. Perhaps in the corner of the box there will be a suggestion of a yellow flower. She sprinkles green flitter the length of the stem, gold on the yellow flowers, and outlines the green leaves with a touch of red. Each box is different and each. is lovely.

Her flitter, which she buys at a sign painter's supply house, is $1.10 a pound. She has it in silver, gold, magenta, red, green, blue, lime, purple and rose. She also uses a box of multi-colored which she gets by brushing all surplus into one box.

She buys her matches wholesale and buys forty gross at a time. The matches come to three-quarters of a cent a box.

If matches are to be mailed, they must be wrapped in asbestos or aluminum foil. Mrs. Cohen contacted an asbestos company, but as her account would be so small, the cost would be too great proportionately. So she takes her chances at finding aluminum foil in the grocery store.

Mrs. Cohen has streamlined her work to such an extent that she finds she can make about 100 boxes in an hour. By snatching an hour here and fifteen minutes there for work on her match boxes, Louise has made enough money to buy some beautiful pieces of furniture for her new home.