A Short Course on Sea Glass

"A Short Course on Sea Glass"," A bottle; or too many bottles in many cases, tossed into the water breaks in the surf, and years later its shards have transformed into beautiful gems worthy of becoming part of a coveted piece of jewelry.
 The longer the glass is in the water, and becomes hydrated, the more of a patina, or ""frost"" it develops as a result of the lime and soda elements leaching out.
 The patina sparkles like tiny diamonds in the light, one of the hallmarks of genuine sea glass; a trait that has yet to be achieved by simply tumbling or acid washing of glass commercially.
 The most common colors found today are clear, brown, and kelly green, the color of many beer bottles.
 One look and you can recognize that it is not the color scheme used commercially today.
 The glass pieces with a soft green shade that looks so ethereal were most commonly turn of the century Coca-Cola bottles.
 Most of these are the lime green, forest green and brown glass shades that have darkened in the sun to the point that they appear black.
 True aqua, periwinkle, teal, and cobalt blue shades originated as medicine bottles and home glassware.
 The ""champagne"" to purple colored sea glass is often extremely old clear glass made circa WW1.


The absolute rarest sea glass find is orange or red, the prize of a lifetime for sea glass collectors.
 Some sea glass has wavy irregular shapes as if it had been melted.
 This glass has a very unusual look, though it is hard to set in silver due to its baroque edges.
 Occasionally, pieces are bi-colored, from two separate glass shards fusing together.
 The ""end of day"" glass patterns are spectacular, and the edges are very smooth and unusual.
 Was the piece someone's pop bottle in the sixties, or was it part of a sea captain's liquor bottle hundreds of years ago? Perhaps some of that old Chesapeake sea glass came blasting out of a local cannon during the Battle of 1812.
 Then there's sea pottery, shards of broken china worn smooth by the sea.