Projects

Some settling is normal

Sea glass is a fun thing to collect, but it’s not easy to display. Fill a glass jar with the stuff, and the cool translucence gets lost. But how can you lay out just one layer of broken glass?

After rolling the idea around in my head until it was smooth and polished, I came up with a plan: Make an 8" × 10" glass sandwich with four layers of thick matboard in between. Cut a 4" × 6" window through all of them, and put the sea glass in that hole. When everything’s assembled in the frame, glue strips of wood inside the back of the frame to keep it all in place.

Even though the space between the panes of glass is only about 3/8", there’s still enough depth to make stacking irregular pieces of glass on edge a little challenging. As a result, I couldn’t seem to prevent a gap from forming on the top no matter how I arranged things. Oh well.