I Sea Glass

I love sea glass (sometimes called beach glass) and have been collecting it for years. When kept in water, the little bits sparkle like jewels and when dried off, the soft matte colors are frosty and beautiful. Sea glass is created when littered glass bottles are broken and the pieces are then "polished" by being tossed about in the waves against the sandy beach. Nature's own recycling turns trash into quite a treasure.

The most common colors of sea glass just happen (!) to correspond with the most common colors of beer bottles. Go figure. Brown, green and clear. Blue, yellow and pink glass makes gorgeous sea glass and red is a rare find. The rarest color of all sea glass? Orange. It's only found in about one out of every 10,000 pieces of sea glass. That sounds about right. In all of the tens of thousands of times I have bent over to pick up sea glass, I think I have only found 2 or 3 pieces of orange glass.

What to do with sea glass? I like just the bottled displays on a sunny windowsill. Beautiful jewelry can be made and here's a unique idea of fitting pieces together to make unique art.

The North American Sea Glass Association holds an annual exhibit (coming up this Fall in Delaware) that looks like it would be fun to visit. Check out the "Shard of the Year" contest!