DIY Sea Glass

Well, here I am, I am back and would love to share my craftiness with you. I llllove to make things with my hands and love to get ideas from the web. I would like to share my experiences with DIY projects and what has worked for me.

I am going to start with a coastal theme. One of my sisters just bought a garden home in Rockport and wants do decorate it with a coastal theme. This got my creative juices flowing and I wanted to help. I love sea glass and wanted to know if I could make it myself. I found a post from someone that made some themselves. I thought, I can do that! Here are the steps for making your own sea glass.

Supplies

Glass bottles

Old cotton socks

Hammmer

Rock Tumbler

Sand

1. Find some glass: I looked through my tons of bottles (I am addicted to glass, among other things!) and picked out some colors that I liked. I chose a coca-cola bottle (it was sort of a very light green) a blue liquor bottle (I love the blue bottles), a green wine bottle and a clear jar. 
2. Break the glass: This was the hardest part! I put on safety glasses, some leather work gloves and then I put a bottle in an old cotton sock. At first I tried hitting the bottle with a hammer, that did not work (I think glass only breaks when you aren't trying to break it!). So finally my husband took over and held the bottle inside the sock and hit the bottle on the hammer! Genuis, it worked! I then continued to hit the hammer until I achieved the sizes of glass I wanted. I dumped the glass pieces into a plastic shoe box and sorted out the ones I wanted.
3. Tumble the glass. For this you will need a rock tumbler. This is the most expensive part of the process but I have gotten a lot of use out of mine. I got mine a couple of years ago from a gem store when I went through a rock polishing phase. You can also order them from Amazon, here is the link:  Rock Tumbler from Amazon . This is the exact tumbler I have and it works great.  Fill the tumbler about 3/4 full of glass pieces, add sand and enough water to just cover the glass. You don't have to buy any special polish you can just add some sand to the tumbler. Follow the manufacturers instructions for use. It will take about 1-2 weeks of tumbling to get the glass to have that opaque sea glass look. I checked mine after a week and wanted it to look a little more worn.
4. Here is the finished product!