This article examines the popular long-running Dutch women’s magazine De Gracieuse (1862–1936). More particularly, it focuses on its foundation and first two years of publication (1862–64), before De Gracieuse became an official edition of—and almost identical to—the internationally successful German fashion and needlework magazine Der Bazar (1855–1936). Combining archival research of the publisher’s correspondence with digital searching of nineteenth-century periodical databases not only reveals the wide variety of foreign periodicals from which the early Gracieuse sourced material. It also reveals the formative input of three women working behind the scenes as editors. As this article will show, these women turned the common nineteenth-century practice of ‘scissors-and-paste’ journalism into a creative tool for shaping a new type of women’s magazine for the Dutch market.