Make Sea Glass in a Rock Tumbler

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World back in 2016.

Yes, you can 100% make sea glass in a rock tumbler. It's super easy, and it comes out straight-up looking like sea glass. 

Here's how to do it.

How to Make Sea Glass in a Rock Tumbler

You will need: 

  rock tumbler. You want a good-quality metal one, something along the lines of the Thumler's Tumbler that we own. Good rock tumblers are pricey, but they make a great gift for a science-minded kid, so much so that if you don't have a science-minded kid of your own, someone you know probably has one and may in fact have a rock tumbler that you can borrow. 

  filler. This takes up the spaces between the glass pieces. You can use either ceramic media or plastic beads, both of which can be re-used. 

  coarse grit. Unlike rock tumbling, which requires coarse grit, fine grit, pre-polish, and polish, making sea glass in a rock tumbler only calls for coarse grit. 

  broken glass. You don't want anything too thin, like microscope slides, because the rock tumbler will abrade it so that it's too thin to be useful. I had great luck with vintage glass bottles, however. 

  hammer and towel. Gotta break that glass somehow! 

  tile nippers. These aren't necessary, but if you want to shape or trim your glass at all, you need them.

 1. Break some glass. As I mentioned before, I'm using vintage glass bottles to make sea glass, because that's what I have a million of and need to find more things to do with. I'm primarily choosing either the glass bottles that were broken when I found them, or that are of unimportant provenance. I clean up and polish the nice vintage glass bottles and display them around my house, even though I've frankly got too many of those, as well. 

 ANYWAY... my preferred method of breaking a glass bottle is to wrap it in a towel, set it on my driveway, then whack it with a hammer. From the mess of broken glass, I pick out the nice pieces that I want to tumble. I really like bottle necks and bottle bottoms (ahem...), and also the side pieces if they've broken into a shape that I think will look nice when tumbled. 

 Use the tile nippers to trim a piece of broken glass into a more interesting shape, or chip off the edges around a bottle's bottom. 

  2. Set up the rock tumbler. Use these instructions to make your tumbled glass. Note, however, that the instructions explicitly tell you not to use glass bottles. My experience is that you can, although you still want to avoid any glass that's too thin. A Coca-Cola bottle should work. A spaghetti sauce jar probably won't. 

 3. Check your work. When you open up your rock tumbler after five or so days, the inside will look like this:  

Instead of sifting out the tumbled glass, I pick it out of the matrix and examine it. A couple of times, a piece has cracked and needs to be set aside. Sometimes, a piece is perfect just the way that it is and I love it. Most times, though, the tumbled piece is almost perfect, but still needs some refining. For that, get the tile nippers back out. 

 For instance, after examining that bottle neck in the above photograph, I decided that I'd like it better if it was trimmed even closer to the edge, so I did: 

 4. Go for round #2. Pop any glass that you've trimmed, and enough new pieces to maintain the level in your tumbler, back into the barrel with the same grit and filler material. Give it a go for another five or so days, and then take a look. 

Repeat until you're happy! 

I Made a Sewing Machine Cover from an Old Blanket and a Vintage Quilt Top

 

As we all knew it would, last year's sewing machine saga ended with me buying another sewing machine.

I do NOT understand why sewing machines are impossible to repair!

I mean... obviously I DO know why sewing machines are impossible to repair. If the sewing machine company (*cough, cough, all of them, cough*) makes its sewing machine using plastic parts, then your sewing machine will inevitably break before too long, because plastic isn't a good material for a hard-wearing, hard-working sewing machine part. And when that two-dollar piece of plastic that makes up some crucial part of your machine's operation cracks and renders your sewing machine inoperable, you can't buy a new two-dollar piece of plastic to replace it, because the company doesn't sell its parts separately.

It is SUCH a racket. Even my old metal sewing machine is just about impossible to repair these days, as its replacement parts are now vintage and therefore also hard to find. 

I just really need somebody with a 3D printer and an entrepreneurial spirit to start a business copying and selling sewing machine parts. I'll buy the snot out of your products before you get shot down for patent infringement!

Speaking of stealing another entity's intellectual work... I 100% created my sewing machine cover by cutting the cheap-looking cover that my machine came with apart at the seams and tracing it.

Where did I get that cotton blanket that I found at the very bottom of my stash fabric bin? No clue, but I love it as the base fabric of my sewing machine cover.

Where did I get that vintage quilt top, also found at the bottom of my stash fabric bin? No clue, but it's perfect for embellishing that cotton blanket!

I used my wood star template to make a couple of stars to embellish the cover, and I love how they look patchwork without me putting in the effort!

I zig-zag stitched them to the cover, although I should have put some interfacing under them first:

Just don't look at how the applique is a little wavy. Instead, look at how nicely my sewing machine is protected from dust!

Let's hope this sewing machine lasts longer than the last four!

How to Frost Glass

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Whether you want to upcycle a Mason jar to look like sea glass or alter a window so that it no longer offers a picture-perfect view directly into your bathtub, frosted glass is a beautiful way to make glass opaque while maintaining translucency. 

 Frosted glass is easy to DIY, and there are a ton of different methods to do it. The easiest method, and the one that I'm going to show you here, is as simple as adding a couple of coats of spray paint to a squeaky clean glass surface. Here are my two vintage Coca-Cola bottles before being frosted. One I've left clear, and the other I've already spray painted a color that turned out to be WAY brighter than I wanted. It would be nice if the flower vases didn't outshine the flowers! 

 This is for sure a project for making sure that your spray painting technique is on point--it's very important to hold the spray paint 10-12" from the object you're painting, and to coat it with light, overlapping sprays. Here's the clear glass bottle after one coat of frosted glass spray paint: 

 You don't have to wait any specific time before you can recoat the object, but it takes about ten minutes for the full frosted glass effect to show up, so don't get too impatient. Here's my bottle after two coats of frosted glass spray paint: 

 As you've gathered, you can use this frosted glass spray paint even on a surface that isn't already clear, but the result won't look like frosted glass. Here's my red bottle after two coats of frosted glass spray paint: 

 I do really like how the frosted glass paint mutes the shine and saturation of this painted surface--it's definitely not a look I'd want for everything, but it's a nice look for a vase for spring flowers. 

I Made a Jewelry Organizer from a Vintage BINGO Game

I first published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

I originally bought this vintage BINGO game from a thrift store when my two kiddos were a toddler and a preschooler.

Fun fact: EVERY little kid loves BINGO, and this game stayed in heavy rotation on our games shelves for a shocking number of years. Heck, we still played it even after we lost a couple of the numbers. Knowing that some numbers will literally never be called just adds to the challenge!

My little kids are teenagers now, and their plan for the ultimate game night is no longer BINGO but Cards Against Humanity (don't tell them, but I took out all the really awful cards before they saw them, mwahaha!). Normally, I'd happily donate something that we no longer use to another thrift store for someone else to discover and love for another decade, but my philosophy is that I do NOT donate something that's broken or has missing pieces.

Not only is it a waste of effort and space to put that thing on a thrift store shelf, but it's disrespectful to the person who might then buy it and be stuck with it. And what if they're frustrated and decide that it's not worth it to buy secondhand anymore? Then you've just done a disservice to the entire planet, all because of one BINGO game!

I spend a lot of time carrying around potential anxiety. It's a thing.

tl;dr: a super-old BINGO game that's missing some vital pieces is not something that you donate. It's something that you upcycle!

The first project on the list: I turned the vintage BINGO board into a jewelry organizer. It was a quick and easy project and it turned out great. Here's how I did it!

Supplies

You will need:

• Vintage game board with pegs: You'd be surprised how many board games include plastic parts that would work for this project. If you've got an old Trouble game or some Hungry Hungry Hippos, then you're all set. Want to get crazy? Throw up a dartboard with darts!
• Paint (optional): You can embellish your jewelry organizer any way you'd like.
• Sharpies: Sharpies draw on plastic like a dream, so a Sharpie is a great choice for adding enough color to allow the embossing on this BINGO board to stand out.
• Picture Hanger: Since I'm using this as a jewelry organizer, I upcycled a couple of jewelry findings for this. If you're looking for the cheapest solution possible, paper clips are totally valid picture hangers, I declare.
• Hot Glue: Hot glue also works well on plastic.

Directions

1. Scrub Your Vintage Game Board

This BINGO board was actually really gross, once I stopped playing with it and instead took a good, close look at it. Fortunately, some dish-washing soap, a scrub brush, and time to air dry put it to rights.

2. Use A Sharpie To Highlight Details

As you can tell from my photos, all that white on white is just about impossible to photograph, and it's just as impossible to see the details of. I wanted all the little numbers, especially, to stand out clearly, which means that I had to add the contrast myself. I traced over all of the embossings with a navy Sharpie.

Don't the numbers stand out so much better afterward?

3. Clean Up Any Sharpie Mistakes

If you get Sharpie somewhere you don't want it, the secret is to remember that a permanent ink still has to be soluble in something, or it wouldn't be a liquid. With Sharpies, the liquid that the ink is soluble in is plain old rubbing alcohol.

That means that if you don't want that Sharpie ink somewhere, you just have to wet a cotton swab in rubbing alcohol and gently dab the stain away.

It's magical (Psst! Don't forget to only buy biodegradable cotton swabs!)!

After the rubbing alcohol is dried, you can also seal your jewelry organizer if you really want to. I didn't seal this project because it's not going to get any hard wear, and if it randomly does, the Sharpie is easy to reapply.

4. Add Hangers To The Jewelry Organizer

Since the BINGO board is so light, this was another thing that I could play around with. I hot glued brooch clips to the top of the BINGO board, and then just clipped them onto the nails to mount my new jewelry organizer.

This DIY jewelry organizer is working really well for me, although if I'd been less selfish, I'd have put it in the kids' bathroom instead. Don't you think a game board jewelry organizer would look especially cute in a teenager's bathroom? The next time they're in a major snit about something, a little whimsy might remind them to chill out just a tad.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. I'll let you know if my whimsical jewelry organizer keeps ME from wallowing in my next major snit, okay?

If you've got any cool ideas for upcycling BINGO numbers or BINGO cards, please share them with me in the comments below. I mean sure, I've given a new life to one part of this old game, but there are lots more left to remake.

I Bought a Vintage Disney Puzzle off of Ebay

So, you know, that's about how I'm doing during this pandemic!

I've actually been looking for this Disney Fantasy puzzle, manufactured in 1981, for decades. I don't really remember gobs and gobs from my childhood, but one of my most vivid--and happiest!--memories is working this puzzle with some of the adults in my life at my grandparents' giant wooden dining room table.

The funny thing is that I remember the puzzle being super challenging--like, it had EVERY Disney character on it! So many Disney characters!--but I was probably only about 5 or 6 years old. 

And the puzzle actually only has 300 pieces!

Fridays after our school day and Matt's work day have ended are what I've come to think of as Happy Hour. I set up a new puzzle and a podcast (Welcome to Night Vale or The Magnus Archives are current family favorites), or some coloring and an audiobook (we're currently medium-way through Dracula), or just crosswords and Syd's Spotify playlist (she's no longer heavy on the Billie Eilish!), and, most importantly for getting the kids' buy-in, SNACKS. Matt makes the adults cocktails, and we just hang out around the table and chill. 

It turns out that a 300-piece puzzle is just about perfect for chilling around a big table on a Friday night, with margaritas and Cheez-Its and Zebra Cakes (because SNACKS!).

It took one to two adults and one to two kids about two-and-a-half hours to put together this puzzle--

--and it's just as adorable and interesting as I remembered!

Syd asked, "Where are all the princesses?", and that's one of the most interesting things, because in 1981, there weren't many princesses! 1981's Disney was still very much associated with anthropomorphized cartoon animals:

Alas, all the racist characters are present--see the crows from Dumbo? And the Br'er animals from Song of the South?

But you've also got some pretty deep cuts from the other Disney cartoons. When is the last time you've seen Clarabelle Cow?

Syd also noticed this one--why the snot is Tinkerbell's dress PINK?!?

Ugh I love it SO MUCH!!! I don't know what happened to the one that I had when I was six, but this one I am keeping forever, and I am FOR SURE going to put it together again while watching Disney movies when we buy a month of Disney+ later this summer (HAMILTON IS COMING TO DISNEY+!!!!!!!!!).

But only the movies that came out by 1981. And not the racist ones.

I'll let you know what color Tinkerbell's dress is!

P.S. If you, too, remember liking Disney circa 1981, this 1981 Disney newspaper is hella cool. I *might* have gone to Disney World the first time around then (although the only thing that I remember about that trip is the Main Street Electrical Parade, particularly Pete's Dragon scaring the shit out of me), so it's interesting to see what was going on!

How to Paint a Folk Art Coca-Cola Bottle

I've been spray painting some of my vintage Coca-Cola bottles because they look awesome that way, even though I don't know what to do with them afterwards other than put them back on the same shelf where they lived before, but now looking awesome.

I'm thinking candle holders. Stay tuned.

Anyway, every now and then I mess up the spray paint job and end up with bubbles or drips, so I was also trying to think of a way to rescue the messed-up bottles, when I remembered how even more awesome the folk art Coca-Cola bottles that we saw at World of Coca-Cola were.

The folk art bottles were embellished in all kinds of ways, from decoupage to beading to even more extreme transformations, but the most accessible method that still had beautiful results was simply to paint on them.

To make the most authentic folk art, you should have no expectations built from previous experiences of what the artwork should be, so instead of trying something myself, I first gave a red spray-painted Coca-Cola bottle to the youngest of us. I provided her with my new favorite art supply, paint pens, and asked her if she would like to paint on this bottle for me.

Reader, she would!



And you're not going to believe what she came up with. The specific decorations are very much her own, but I think that the overall look reminds me VERY much of other folk art Coca-Cola bottles that I've seen:



I love that she went over the embossing in white, so that it stands out, and there's also a cat and a ballerina, representing her favorite things, and a mug of hot coffee, which she says represents my favorite thing.

I've already tried to get Will to paint a bottle, too, and she refused because she didn't like the feel of painting over the bumps, but I'm hoping that if I can catch her in the right mood she'll agree another time, and then I'll corner Matt, and then I'll make one, myself, and then we'll have a whole family of painted folk art bottles.

Just don't ask me what I'm going to do with them...

P.S. Here are some other things you could do with a stash of clear vintage bottles on your hands:

• Cut them down and pour candles in them.
• I'm pretty sure I have the right tools to drill a hole into a glass bottle, maybe for a string of twinkle lights or a post.
• If they're filthy, here's the best way to get them squeaky clean.
• I do NOT have the tools to flatten a glass bottle. Do you?
• I think this paint-dyed glue would make a more economical alternative to paint pens.
• I don't love the effects of dyeing the bottle from the inside, but maybe you do?
• I also want to try painting them from the inside with craft acrylics.
• Cover the bottle in twine, and it would make a lovely vase.

How to Make a Beeswax Candle in an Upcycled Container

You know that I've been obsessed with my found vintage Coca-Cola bottles, right? I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be happy until I've figured out a hundred ways to upcycle them.

Here's my latest creation, and the project that I'm currently the most excited about:



Why, yes, I DID turn a vintage Coca-Cola bottle into a candle!

Here's the best way to clean your old glass bottles. Cutting, grinding, and polishing the bottle is a whole other skill set that I've been learning, and I'll tell you all about that another time--although I HAVE found the perfect technique for it all, rest assured!--but for now, let's just talk about how to pour a beeswax candle into an upcycled glass or metal container, as that on its own is an awesome skill set to have and it makes an awesome candle.

Here's what you'll need:

• beeswax and a way to heat it (I prefer a crock pot, which is dead simple to find dirt cheap at any thrift store)
• upcycled glass or metal container, such as a Mason or jam jar (I am not responsible for making sure that your container can handle heat--use common sense, Friends!)
• candle wicks. If your candle sucks, it's pretty much always because you used the wrong diameter of candle wick. Wicks have specific diameters for specific diameters of candles, so do your research.
• hot glue gun, hot glue sticks, tape, and a pencil with an eraser.
• heat gun or hair dryer

1. Set up the candle wick in the container. Put a generous amount of hot glue near the end of the wick, then use the eraser end of the pencil to help you push it into the middle of the container and center it at the bottom:

Don't do this immediately before you pour the hot beeswax; the hot glue needs a little time to cure, or it will melt and set your wick free when the melted beeswax hits it. If that happens, put an oven mitt on your hand and just pour the melted beeswax back into the crock pot, ready to start again.

Wrap the wick a few times around the middle of the pencil, which you're going to set on top of the container. Get the wick nice and centered, then tape the free end to the side of the bottle:

Your wick will stay stable and centered, and you won't have to cut it at this step and waste it.

2. Melt the beeswax. If you melt beeswax at too high of a temperature for too long, it will darken, so keep your crock pot on low and turn it off when you no longer need the beeswax.

3. Pour the wax into the candle. I spilled a lot of beeswax before I decided to stop trying to pour around the pencil and just pour into the middle of the container, right over the pencil. You can clean the wax off of the pencil later, or it can just be the pencil that you always use in candlemaking.

I poured a little too much wax into this candle--

--but I did a better job with this bottle after I realized that I should mark a line on the bottle to pour to rather than eyeballing it:

4. Fix your mistakes. Let the beeswax harden, then cut off the wick and check out all the places on your candle that suck. I had a lot of dribbles and spills, and with that Coca-Cola bottle, especially, I had a LOT of air bubbles, especially against the sides of the bottle, messing up the whole look. And I had those marks on the amber bottle candle where my excess wicking was touching the top of the wax.

To fix all of your mistakes, what you do is get out your heat gun or a hairdryer, and remelt the beeswax. Don't point it at just one spot so that you don't crack the container, but melt all around the bottle and at the top so that air trapped against the sides of the bottle can get out, and new wax can flow in from the top. You can even melt more beeswax in the crock pot and pour it over the top, although you'll have to do the heat gun step again after that wax cures, too, probably:

After you've evened out the wax and gotten all the air bubbles out, your candle should look pretty dang awesome! Light it, love it, and don't leave it alone.

P.S. Now that I no longer have Crafting a Green World's Facebook page to handle, I miss the interaction that social media brings. Please come hang out with me at my Craft Knife Facebook page instead! It's fun!

I Figured Out the BEST Way to Clean Glass Bottles, and Surprise, It Requires Power Tools!

First, some news:

News Update #1: Crafting a Green World has been sold, and so I am no longer its editor. I might write a post a week or so for the new iteration of Crafting a Green World, or I might not--in other news, negotiating sucks and I hate it. I do love being paid, though, which is now not happening, so this is as good a time as any to remind you about my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop and that if you shop on Amazon using my Amazon Affiliate links--why, look! Here's one now!

--I get paid a miniscule percentage of that sale, but hey, every nickel shifted my way from Amazon is one more nickel towards my kids' ballet classes and horseback riding lessons.

The upside is that I've finally discovered that what I actually needed in order to consistently work on my novel-in-progress was actual dedicated writing time, and so using my formerly CAGW writing time as novel writing time has been excellent.

Which leads me inevitably to...

News Update #2: I'm on a roll with working on my novel, so of COURSE my laptop died. The computer repair shop says the motherboard stopped working, and the laptop is under warranty so Dell says they'll fix it... in 10-12 business days, not counting transit time. Many men have mansplained for me not to worry, Little Lady, your computer's memory is fine and so you'll still have your novel and all of your photos when it comes back, but in my 40 years on this planet I have learned some distrust, let's say, for the patriarchy, so all I'm gonna reply is a disenfranchised sort of "we'll see."

And that's why today's post is 1) not a continuation of my Greece vacation, on account of all of my Greece photos are on my laptop with a dead motherboard, and 2) concerning a subject that normally I'd be writing about on Crafting a Green World, because I'm not writing for Crafting a Green World right now, and although I'm negotiating (shudder), I'm not holding my breath that I'll be writing for Crafting a Green World again, so why sit on a post that I've researched and am ready to write?

If I do write for them again I'll probably wish I'd sat on some posts and had them researched and ready to write, but whatever. Live in the moment, Y'all!

Anyway, y'all know that I have been trying to find meaningful uses for a neverending supply of vintage glass bottles pretty much since we moved into this house. It was about a week afterwards that the kids and I discovered that the drive-in next door apparently spent the 1960s and 70s dumping its trash into the back of the woods, and man, if you went to the drive-in in the 1960s and 70s, you sure as hell drank a lot of beer and soda!

None of them, not even the perfect Coca-Cola bottles, are worth more than a couple of bucks, and the vast majority of them are worth absolutely nothing, but still... I can't put them in the recycling, because if they're not soda-lime glass, they won't go through the equipment correctly. And I CANNOT toss them in the trash, because then they'll just live forever in someone else's dump instead of my own.

So yeah, I hoard them. One day I'm going to get over my fear of being axe-murdered and put them on Freecycle, but today is not that day.

To make the thing a little more annoying, even if I do want to clean up some of the nicer bottles to display or maybe even sell, it's ridiculous, because they've spent 40-50 years outside in the woods, and so they're dirty and gross and need a good scrubbing inside and out. I broke my heart trying different methods to get them clean, always coming back to the need to scrub each one by hand for a million years...

Until Matt thought of the solution. It looks like this:



This is a cordless drill with a paddle bit attached, and to that paddle bit Matt has duct taped a bottle brush. Here's a closer look at the sophisticated join:

Yes, I love it, but I do want you to notice that he used not the regular duct tape, but the more expensive gold duct tape that I bought for making Spartan armor.

That, my Friends, is all you need to do this:

Thanks to Syd for the excellent photography. No thanks to anyone in the family for not helping enough with the dishes.

You put a squirt of dishwashing soap into the bottle, then some water. Then you insert the bottle brush and use the drill to scrub that baby OUT!

Soap will fly everywhere if you do, but you can also scrub the outside with the same set-up:

See the soap flying everywhere? Worth it!

It used to take FOREVER--seriously, I promise you it took forever--to scrub one bottle, but yesterday I did seven of them, timing myself with the oven clock, and my average was five minutes per bottle for the whole process, including rinsing it out afterwards.

If you're dealing with vintage bottles that have been exposed to the elements, this will not make them perfect. Nothing will do that. They won't have degraded, because they'll never degrade (which is why you want to keep them out of the waste stream as much as possible), but the sun will have done weird things to them, as will the soil, as will the 40+ years of temperature fluctuations and freezes and thaws. If I want them to look as nice as possible I will then fill them with straight vinegar and put them in a bucket of straight vinegar and leave them to soak for at least a day.

I didn't do that for these bottles, though, because I'm probably just going to paint them. Still, don't they look very nice?





Some will be cut and turned into candles, because I've also taught myself how to cut glass bottles in my CAGW-free time, but for most, I have this weird idea for painted bottle candle holders that I'm playing with...

...so stay tuned!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Antique Sleds and Vintage Beads

a tutorial for making ornament hangers out of old beaded necklaces

and a tutorial for cleaning and maintaining an old wood and metal sled

The girls do have one plastic sled, as well, and they've learned through experience that the plastic sled is much better for that very first day of snow, when it's all dry and fluffy. Give the snow another day, though, to pack down a little, and the wood and metal sled becomes an unstoppable force of gravity, careening at bullet speed past the kids on their light little sheets of plastic. 

Okay, and one time it definitely careened at bullet speed INTO a kid, and the kid cried and his mom was pissed, and fine, I apologized, but to be fair, every single other kid at the park was sledding *here* and walking back up the hill *there*, and if YOUR kid is going to insist on walking back up the hill here, where everyone is sledding, and not there, where everyone is walking, well...

My kids' sled is heavy and fast.