How many shades of green are there?  Well in Sea Glass, there is no limit.  Here is my collection of green seaglass.

In the bottom right, you have the very light – almost blue clear glass.  This is mostly flat glass as used in windows.  This is more likely the pure silica glass without any clarifying agents.  It has a bluish tint and to some eyes like mine appears green.

In the top right is mostly emerald green- the third most common seaglass colour.  While there is some flat glass, I have mostly rounded “bottle glass”, including a bottle bottom where I can see the imprint “one quart”.

Continuing counterclockwise, we find the medium-dark (drab or olive green).  Many of these come from old bottles, usually wine, that needed to be protected from sunlight.  A few have bubbles in them which is typical of early 1900’s hand blown glass.

On the far left I have several “black” pieces.  These are a very dark green and sometimes you need to hold them to very bright light to see they are indeed green.  These darker greens usually come from medicine bottles. These often had iron added to them, not only for the darkness (uv light protection) but also to harden the glass. Therefore your late 1800’s expensive medicine bottles were less likely to break if dropped.

On the bottom left I have a few brownish pieces. Like the transition from blue to turquoise to green, these pieces tend to appear green next to brown glass but brown next to green glass.

Then I have a dozen or more “one of a kind” greens that range from almost blue to almost grey.  It would be interesting to find the time to explore the origin of all these various colours.  I know some are recent pieces and are the product of modern alchemy but it is fun to discover how we used to “tint” glass a hundred or more years ago.

More on sea glass colours to follow.  Thanks for stopping by . . .

Granny ~oo~

Recently, I resorted my entire collection of seaglass.  Now that the summer is over, there is “less” to do on PEI and I needed a challenge. Sorting seaglass by colour is not as easy as it seems.  After awhile the blue and greens and near-whites all blend in.  The pictures I will feature over the next few days are 3/4 of the way into the process.

Click on the picture for a bigger version.  Here we have some greys, almost yellow, pink, aqua, dark blue (cornflower and cobalt), red and lavender.  So yes I am proud to day I have several pieces of red glass and some pink.  I don’t think I have any yellow glass yet, just dirty glass that has been stained a yellowish colour.

Did you notice in the blue that I have the bottom of a noxzema bottle?  Here it is closer up. I actually have two pieces with most of the word Noxzema on them.  I also have found a piece that says “seltzer”.  I gather that is from a blue Bromo Seltzer bottle. It is fun to see where our glass originated. . . more on  that in another post.

But what about this lavender glass?  That is another story all its own. Clear glass actually has a bluish tint. In the 1920’s, manganese dioxide was added to glass to counteract the bluish tint.  Sometimes, MORE Manganese dioxide was used to actually create a lavender coloured glass.  We later discovered that when exposed to UV rays, the manganese in glass makes it turn purple.  It inherited the name “lavender glass”  Now, different colouring agents are used to make clear glass.

So you might say “like carbon dating”, we can tell how old glass is by how purple it is.  Not really. it depends on two factors: how much manganese was in the glass in the first place, and how long the glass has been exposed to UV rays.  So I suspect I have some purple glass from the 1920’s but cannot ever really be sure.

Come back soon for another colour discussion.

Granny ~oo~

UPDATE!! I have found an article talking about FAKED lavender glass – what a shame.  That is probably what I have and would not be able to date it accurately as OLD 🙁