"Cabinet" photographs - coming to a tarot deck near you soon.

Called in to see our friend Dita (please DO visit her shop if you are in Prague - I will add the link when I can find it) and picked up two incredible and very old pieces of hand-embroidered fabric. Which this time I WILL post pictures of (once it's dry - I handwashed it carefully as we try to clean everything before use). The fabric is VERY old, and maybe too fragile to use more than one section of one piece - it's SO very beautiful though. Anyway, just for interest, here is one of the cabinet cards we just bought.It's Viennese, and we've been speculating about the relationship of the two girls. They are dressed identically, but they obviously aren't twins. Sisters? Two friends in school uniform (did mid-19th century uniform look like that?) Well, who can say? We are using a lot of these cabinet photographs as one of the major sources for the deck imagery. They may end up looking very different by the time they are incorporated, but they have an authenticity that we just couldn't get by drawing from scratch. As Alex says, somehow people had different faces then (or is it different hair and expressions that make it seem so?) We nearly have all the imagery we need - I think we have plans for about 70 of the cards now. But there are always a few that are hard - and of course we tend to see alternative images as we go along so sometimes there are changes. I am loving making this deck - it has a tremendous atmosphere I think: