Antique Victorian German Die Cuts Scrap Farm Children BL

Please note that this is real, full size antique scrap, not a miniature.

Well, this one is NOT one of my finds! I was showing my grandfather a picture of the miniature Victorian book and he brought me down to his basement to show me these exquisite die cut scrap pictures!

My grandfather was a candy maker and he and used to make the most beautiful things out of candy like roses and hand-woven baskets - all of sparkling, colored candy. He also made something called Panorama Easter Eggs. If you've never seen one of these, it was an egg, made of sugar or chocolate that was hollow. A round hole was left in one end and covered with plastic or glass - if you looked inside the egg, you saw a beautiful scene that looked 3-D filled with pictures of flowers and children playing and all sorts of things!

My grandfather had bought these scrap pictures to use inside the panorama Easter eggs and just gave me the ones he still has. He wasn't sure exactly how old they were, but I think that they are from before WWII started - he told me that after the war, these pictures became impossible to find because all of the factories had been bombed during WW II .

The scrap pictures themselves are absolutely exquisite. This sheet is of adorable little farm boys and girls!

This sheet of exquisite scrap is in three rows of country kids . I'll just describe a few. The first little girl is barefoot and wearing a pretty red kerchief on her head. Her blue polka dotted dress is blowing in the wind as she rakes. Next to her is a little boy wearing an adorable brown beret carrying his lunch in a green sack over his shoulder and a blue thermos bottle. Next to him is a little girl carrying sheaves of golden wheat in one hand and a woven wicker picnic basket in the other. She's wearing blue and white checkered apron over her old fashioned red puff sleeve blouse and skirt.

One little girl is even wearing old fashioned Dutch wooden shoes !

As you can see in the picture, this is not a full sheet. The bottom row has four children, not six. There are sixteen children in this piece.

Each of the top two row has three different children - two sets of each in mirror image of each other for a total of twelve children (six different ones).

The bottom row sheet is the same as the first, with three different children again. BUT, this bottom row has four of the six children, so you have two of the little boy with the beret and hay cart and one each of the little girl carrying her basket of cabbages and bags of vegetables and one of the little boy feeding a duck

I believe Victorian women and children used to put these into their scrap albums. These are pretty enough to be framed if you're not an ephemera collector !

Whoops! Almost forgot three important pieces of information! The sheet itself measures 9 1/4" wide by and 6 1/2" high. Each individual child is about 2" high by 1 1/2" wide. The sheet is also marked with the initials PZB and has a number on it - #1271 and says: "Printed in Germany".