Figure 1.--With scraps it is not always possible to tell who is a boy and who is a girl. I'm not sure, but I think the child ion the left here is meant to be a boy and the child on the right a girl. These are German scaraps and even though cropped hair was a common dtuyle for boys, you do not normally see boys with cropped hair depicted in the scraps.

A German reader writes, "when I was a child I was eager collecting Oblaten. I couldn't find a proper translation for that. You can use them for scrap-booking. For decades they have been popular. I guess especially around 1900. In some shops you can still buy them. Today mostly used for decorating things in an antique style. Recently I bought those you can see as attachment. I thought they can give us information about colour clothing. I am sure that this new print is a copy of an old print. What do you think about this as a source of information on fashion? HBC does not think that these scraps are a particularly helpful source of information about actual period clothing. This is because the children in the scraps are often elaborately dressed in very colorful clothing that is not confirmed by the photographic record. We should stress here that they can not be entirely dismissed . Some of the scraps are more realistic than others. In addition they also took commonly worn garments and embellished them with elavorate trims and depicted them in bright colors. The colors information is helpful, but we think the color used is more to appeal to purchasers than to accurately reflect how children dressed, These scraps I think are more useful as a artifact of social history. I think they show how many mothers might have LIKED to dress their children.

Created: 10:47 PM 10/14/2005
Last updated: 10:47 PM 10/14/2005