Well, many of you have ever found pieces of glass completely eroded by the sea on the beach. They are called Sea Glass, seaglass, beach glass or Mermaid Tears, and I left you a complete guide about Sea Glass.
In this article I am going to show you how to make a Sea Glass imitation at home. It is called Fake Sea Glass.
There are thousands of collectors of these sea glass and it is increasingly difficult to find them. People use industrial tumblers to produce and sell them.
I know it is not as romantic as going to pick it up at the beach, but what it takes between 20, 30 or 40 years to polish the sea, we will try to reproduce it in 4 hours.
See Glass Step by Step
The method is simple and effective. We just have to take bottles or crystals, break them into pieces and put them inside a tumbler along with sand from the beach as abrasive and water. The sand will help us to erode the glass by friction.
People talks about using acid for improve results. Take note about this trick
And nothing more, to wait while turning the concrete mixer. To separate the sand from the crystals, it is best to have a sieve prepared.
As you see in the image the results are quite good.
Look at the sequence. This is broken glass, before treatment.
After an hour in the tumbler we begin to see the effects of erosion.
After 2 hours, it no longer has live edges and the erosion of the crystal begins to become evident.
After 4 hours in the concrete mixer, we stopped it.
You can continue eroding the crystal more hours if you want. Even cut glasses into shapes.
It is not as glossy as original sea glass. Is more uniform and don’t have the “C” marks you can find in natural one. But
Collectors will not like it, because it eliminates all the magic of the search. But perhaps to decorators or people who use it to make jewelry, if they are interested and can make this tutorial useful 😉
Sources:
- Evil mad Scientist
- Photographies by Windell Oskay Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)