A popular hobby in the 1800s was collecting ‘scraps.’ Scraps were small factory manufactured paper pieces depicting most every popular subject from cute animals to royalty, soldiers to flowers. They were nicknamed scraps because they resembled scraps of paper. They were sold to collectors in uncut sheets. With early sheets, the individual scraps had to be cut out by hand. The pieces in the later sheets came factory die cut. The later versions were brightly colored and detailed and often embossed.

1800s album page with various die cut scraps pasted on.