I don't know why people bother making, selling, buying, or having small articles made of clay, yet at any given moment there are a million craft tables with foolish people doing that thing. Who needs anything made of clay now? Planning a midden?

I used to know someone whose house was chock-a-block with clay things, all of them dismal brown or blue. It was like a warehouse in Babylon, ca. 2500 BC. Some were shiny, some had knobs or other interesting, bogus texture. None of them seemed as if you could actually put anything in them. I think you would have to find special useless stuff to put in them, like joss-sticks or dried flowers.

Every time I visited I would smash a couple secretly because they were boring.