In our neck of the woods we've been under a serious spring thaw. That means that we can start hunting for beach glass again. What started out as just picking up some pretty frosted glass on the beach has turned into an all out hunt for the rarest of colors.
I never realized the history that beach glass holds and that the colors represent different time periods and different types of bottles and glass containers.
The common colors of brown, white, and green are prolific. We have jars and jars of them. But it's the rarer colors of red, blue, purple, orange and black that we are after this summer.
Wikipedia summaries it so well that I'm just going to quote from them: "Sea glass is one of a very few cases of a valuable item being created from the actions of the environment on man-made litter." The shards are tossed against the water, rocks, and sand until they becomes frosted and their rough edges smoothed.
"Rare and extremely rare colors include gray, pink (often from Great Depression era plates), teal (often from Mateus wine bottles), black (older, very dark olive green glass), yellow (often from 1930s Vaseline containers), turquoise (from tableware and art glass), red (often from car tail lights, dinnerware or from nautical lights, it is found once in about every 5,000 pieces), and orange (the least common type of sea glass, found once in about 10,000 pieces).
These colors are found once for every 1,000 to 10,000 pieces collected. Some shards of black glass are quite old, originating from thick eighteenth-century gin, beer and wine bottles."
We found pieces of red, purple, lavender, and black
on our Lake Erie shores.
I am on the hunt for orange or yellow this summer!(yes, princess dress & galoshes - spring hadn't totally sprung yet
and it was only about 45 degrees out!)
(rare sea glass chart borrowed from http://www.westcoastseaglass.com)
