I could title this "Ollllllllld St. Anthony Statue, PART 2"... Some of you may have followed this thread... about an old statue my Great Uncle Antonio brought back from WWII Europe. https://www.antiquers.com/threads/olllllllld-wooden-st-anthony-statue.7666/page-7 Well... I received the remaining "estate" of my Tio Tony today... mostly 1980s miscellaneous stuff from his last apartment. Also, a fishing weight, a cross, and a clip/snap thingie. The cross has a lot of wear on the bale-part, or was purposefully indented. My ol' man thinks it's nickel, for some reason. Isn't the cross sweet? Impressions, please? KingOfThings is being good enough to track his army serial number... we'll see where that leads. Thanks, Kingsie. We may learn more about where St. Anthony once called home! I love this Board.
Maybe 'nickel silver'. Nickel would be magnetic. Rub it with your thumb and see if you get a stinky brass smell or a silver tarnish smell.
I strongly suspect the little cross was made from some wee bit of military hardware. My dad had a fair few bits like that.
Neglected to say... it's about 2.5 by 1.5 inches. Also... sorry if I created a little chaos by making a new thread for this (in addition to the "St. Anthony statue thread)... I wanted to make sure I caught the jewelry folks' eyes. Thanks, all!
Yup - I avoided calling it that, because some of my dad's bits weren't made by soldiers, but rather FOR them. He was in North Africa and I've a ring with a camel on that a local chap made him from something he (Pa) liberated from the army.
Ah cool! Like to see it! For me this falls under the same term, Trench Art, especially because of the material source. 'Comshaw' (spelling varies) in the USN.
Let me see if I can find the thing.....! Yeah, Pa liberated quite a lot. And then, there was the lorry load of a million cigarettes he got from a US Army captain in return for a crate of Scotch. He also addd Epsom salts to cheap white wine and sold it to the Americans as champagne.
There was the time he somehow managed to ship crates of lemons back to my grandmother in London. Never did work out how he managed it.