Working With Seaglass

A Magical Feeling

   For a number of years now I have been making beads from pieces of seaglass found on beaches here in the UK and other countries around the world, selling them from one of my websites and on a commission basis. I have always enjoyed the idea of making beads from recycled glass be it wine bottles, jam jars or any other glass vessel and over the years I have tried most but there is nothing that gives you that special magical feeling like working with seaglass.
   These little gems of the tide with their sand worn surface soft in appearance and smooth to the touch  shaped over many years by breaking waves and tumbled over beach shingle have something very magical about them. Some of these pieces would have started out as bottles as long as 200 or 300 years ago, thrown from great tall ships to be smashed and formed into sea worn jewels by thousands of tides then left on our beaches like coloured gems nestled in carpets of pebbles for us to find.
   A lot of seaglass is used for jewellery making alongside silver wire or drilled to hang on leather but some pieces which have damage or are too large to use in that way are perfect to use for forming beads. Even the tiny shards can be used to make a spacer bead and some of the very large pieces can produce a full set of matching beads perfect for use in one piece of jewellery, you really can't get a more unique bead without natures help.
   There are a couple of dangers in using seaglass for making beads like there are using any other reclyced glass, firstly we don't know how the glass was made or indeed what materials were used in it. So the most important thing is to wear a mask at all times, this goes for any wine bottles or any older glass being used, I treasure my lungs so take no risks. Then there is the fact that recylced glass of any kind will splinter or fly when placed into a flame, so keeping the glass warm is a good idea leading up to use, this helps me a great deal but that doesn't mean to say I don't wear a few burn scars on my arms and like most beadmakers on my neck too.
   Another problem using any kind of recylced glass is the fact that they almost certainly will not mix, in this I mean one piece of glass would have been a different age or a different mixture from the other, so making nice beads with two or more colours of glass for me is a big no no. With most modern glass we use glass with a matching COE (coefficient of expansion), which means the glass is ok to use mixed in a single bead, the different types of glass won't fight each other causing cracks. Because there is no way of knowing the COE of reclyced glass, we can't mix them, if we did and made a nice set of beads which we sold to a jewellery maker who in turn used in some amazing piece of jewellery only to find in time that the beads cracked ( as the cracks don't always form straight away), then the customer really wouldn't be too happy.
   So if you think my opinion is worth anything I would suggest you never buy recylced beads that are made from more than one piece of glass, the easy rule to stick by is if the bead has more than one colour say no.

   The unique thing with using seaglass is that I find the pitted surface of the glass can produce the most amazing tiny bubbles when heated. I call these salt bubbles because I'm sure the salt water  has a big part in forming the surface of seaglass. The only disapointment can be the lose of colour from glass to bead, sometimes the colours of the seaglass will dissapear leaving a clear bead, still full of bubbles yet clear. I have some customers who send me seaglass to make into beads for them but I always remind them of the colour problem, I would say 85% of the time it works out ok but there are the few occasions it won't.
   I hope to start listing some seaglass beads this evening in my etsy shop www.etsy.com/shop/pebbledreams and I'm very much looking forward to a couple of hours working on some this afternoon, it's always a real treat from the normal modern glass and this old beadmaker will be a very happy one.