Friday, January 02, 2009

Hunting for Sea Glass

This morning the weather finally turned warm - so we took a stroll to the beach. We all ended up looking for sea glass to add to Sharon's collection. Sharon and Buddy:

We actually got some pretty neat pieces. (Along with the assorted coal and brick bits at the top left side of the photo.)



Here's up close of some bottle pieces.


Lots of clear glass.

Even a few purple pieces. We read about these - they are from pre-1930 glass that had manganese as a component of the glass. When the glass is exposed to the sun, it turns purple. Cool.

Probably the coolest of all is a bottle piece that we can read the letters "Johnsons Guara and A.B. Gira" - we looked it up online and found that it's from a bottle of Johnsons "Chill Tonic" and was marketed around 1886.

Here's a photo of what the original bottle would have looked like. This chunk has been tumbling in the ocean a while!!

2 comments:

affectioknit said...

That is so cool - we always search for flint up here along the lake shore - some of it is pretty tumbled by the surf (wind created) too - evidence of Native American camps on what is now the lake bed - the Man-Cub has a few already shaped into arrowheads - flint is not a local stone...

Love,

T

Ginger Cookies and a Good Book said...

I'm so jealous of your sea glass haul!!! Did you save any for me or give it all to Sharon?? And I showed you the secret spot!! ha!! ;-) Jeannine