Sea Glass Necklace

July 2016   Love

After going to Revere beach with some friends and finding a lot of sea glass, I decided to do something with some of the glass I found and make a necklace for Bibit. Sea glass is glass that is naturally weathered by the ocean waves and sand, leading to a frosted, smooth surface on glass that has been in the sea for years. According to Wikipedia, sea glass can take 20 - 40 years, sometimes up to 100 years to achieve its rounded and frosted appearance. This makes it a "cool" artifact to use to make jewelry. In addition, it's cheap (free if found on the beach), and no two pieces are exactly alike. On this trip, I found approximately 30 pieces of glass and settled on two to use in this necklace. With some experimentation and trial and error, this necklace was produced!

Drilling the glass

From the assortment of glass found on the beach, two pieces were chosen for the necklace; a clear, linking piece, and a blue, teardrop piece.  After picking the two pieces of sea glass, holes needed to be drilled in them in order to provide a way to connect the two pieces of glass to the chain of the necklace.  A Dremel tool with a diamond coated bit was used to drill the holes in the glass.  All of the drilling was done on a sacrificial piece of wood (as shown in the image below) and was performed with the glass submerged in water.  While drilling glass, it's imperative to drill underwater to keep the glass cool and prevent it from cracking.  Sacrificial sea glass pieces were used to test this drilling technique and to determine how to safely drill the glass with minimal cracking. 

Initial drilling of the sea glass.

The blue and clear sea glass after drilling is complete.  The Dremel tool with the diamond coated bits are also shown.

Assembling the pendant

After the sea glass was drilled, the pendant was assembled using materials acquired from Michaels.  These materials included a silver necklace chain, silver loops to connect the glass to the chain, and earring threads, where one of these earring threads was modified and used to connect the two pieces of sea glass to each other.  The earring thread was used because only a short section of chain was needed to link the two glass pieces; using a small section out of a larger chain would have required buying an entire second chain, and thus would have been wasteful.  This resulted in a slightly different appearance of the necklace chain (silver) and the glass-connecting chain (not silver), but this difference is only noticeable upon close inspection. 

The final pendant with the two glass pieces connected via an earring thread.

The pendant with a silver chain.

The finished necklace.

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