Necklace Made From An Antique 1909 Calendar Plate

This necklace was once a calendar plate...

...Celebrating the year 1909

In 1909:

 Construction on the Titanic began...

 The first men reached the North Pole...

Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened...

In 1909 these things had not yet been invented:

Band-aids, sunglasses, penicillin, zippers, traffic lights.

The average worker earned between $200 to $400 a year.

What do you think?

I Was Once Broken... Jewelry Made From Broken Calendar Plates

Jewelry made from antique broken calendar plates...

Antique calendar plate from 1909 with lots of damage

I have a great love for these old advertising calendar plates...they seem to be one of those things that combine everything that I love in one package: it's a plate, it's old, it's got a beautiful floral transferware design on it...but most especially, it marks a certain point in time. In this case, 1909.

Let's see...in 1909 a newspaper cost 1 cent, coffee was 20 cents a pound, (tea was $1 for 2 lbs, by the way), and a pair of children's shoes cost about $1.50! Hershey bars were 2 cents, but they were a lot smaller than today's 1.65 oz, weighing in at 9/16 oz! To put things a bit more into perspective, the average wage was 22 cents per hour, and the average worker made about $350 a year. We can only wonder what things will be like 100 years from now...

Cracked antique calendar plate from 1909

William Carlos Williams published his first book of poetry in 1909, and Pablo Picasso first began dabbling in cubism...

Necklace that I hand crafted from a broken 1909 calendar plate (sold)

Pin brooch I handcrafted from 1909 calendar plate (sold)








Here are a few necklaces that I just made from the broken plate shown above:





September 1909 available here





September 1909 available here





November 1909 necklace available here





November 1909 necklace available here






What do you think? Do you like these?