Peninsula Daily News - "Seeing Through Glass Eyes"

by Diane Urbani De La Paz

February 5, 2013

You might call West Coast Sea Glass a romantic recycler. Beuke, in her bedroom-size studio, turns broken bits into jewelry that conjure up five senses’ worth of images – blue water, pounding surf, salty air. “A hundred years ago, people threw their garbage in the ocean,” mused Beuke. “Now nature is offering it up.”

Combing beaches

Beuke 42, moved to the Peninsula a decade ago to become youth pastor at Sequim Community Church. When she gave birth to twins four years ago, she became a stay-at-home mom. Now another phase of her girlhood, is under way. Like a lot of people who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Beuke spent weekends combing beaches for glass, pottery shards and shells. Then the people in her life, combined with natural forces, converged to make sea glass collecting a good business and something she calls “a lifestyle.”

Her mother was president of the Oregon Antique Dealers Association and a dealer specializing in glassware. Todd, her husband of 12 years, is a Pacific Northwest historian and teacher at Sequim Middle School. Another influence is the oceans, with their power to polish old milk of magnesia and beer bottles into luminous gems. The cobalt blue, deep green, aqua and pink pieces Beuke uses to make jewelry were, she said, mere trash when they were tossed into the water. She gives histories for each piece, based on color, shape and texture. She shows off baskets of smooth, sea-foam green shapes that were Coca-Cola bottles in another era. There’s a cache of chocolate-brown bits – one of which fetched $26 – that once belonged to whiskey bottles.

Beuke sells her loose sea glass to jewelry makers, and produces her own adornments to sell on her Web site, www.westcoastseaglass.com

Sea glass sells well
Sea glass sells well here.

“It’s natural; it’s beachy,” said Destination Salon owner Ruth Carlin. “I think it’s lovely because it’s simple.”

“But it’s becoming a rare resource,” Beuke said. Around the world, beach erosion is causing sand to be washed out to sea, leaving less beachfront for Beuke to comb. So this is sea glass’ moment” ... Beuke added ...

She’ll be a keynote speaker at the Ocean Shores Beachcombers Festival in March. She’s organizing vendors for October’s North American Sea Glass Festival in Santa Cruz, Calif. And she is the online moderator of an international group of sea glass collectors. Yet the Peninsula is clearly Beuke’s element. Low tide, day or night, brings her out to the sand with her collecting bag and head lamp.

“I have a 50-mile radius of beaches on the Peninsula,” she said. “On my last hike, I walked for 10 hours.”

On a recent morning, Beuke worked in her studio, printing orders for her jewelry and sorting sea glass by color and shape. Todd had gone out for a walk.

“He’s a birder,” Beuke said. So he mostly looks up, not down at the sand. That doesn’t mean he came back empty-handed. In a gesture both romantic and businesslike, Todd dropped eight tiny pieces of sea glass into his partner’s palm. “He found a lavender piece,” said Beuke, impressed...

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Sea Glass Marbles: HOW DO GLASS MARBLES END UP ON THE BEACH?

By Mary Beth Beuke • 17 Jun, 2022

HOW DO GLASS MARBLES END UP ON THE BEACH? There are several theories about why historical glass marbles occasionally wash up on the world's beaches, even today. Reason #1 : In the late 1800's an inventor named Hiram Codd designed a glass soda bottle that used a marble as the stopper at the top. Similarly, the Japanese glass Ramune bottle was also sealed-up with a marble stopper; many times blue ones! These two bottle styles were used in the US and around the world and likely account for a great many of the beach marbles that have been found (and can occasionally still be found) along shorelines globally. When a bottle was discarded, often into the sea, the bottle would break against the rocky shore and the marble might stay intact and tumble for years and likely decades! Historically, marbles were like playtime currency for children! Finding a bottle, and breaking it to get the marble out was quite common. Reason #2 : Decades ago marbles were one of the most popular toys used. Young children played dozens of marble games; Taw games, marble races down a beach slope and marbles were even used in sling shots as ammunition. And the beach made a great place for target practice. Some children played games by floating a "moving target" piece of driftwood off shore then shot their marbles out into the water toward the target. Some seagulls often became the moving targets also. The resulting marbles which landed just offshore, one day washed beachward. Reason #3 : For a span of years, post-industrial-era in the US, marbles found along the railroad lines are most likely the result of dumped over freight-glass. The 3/4", orb-like pieces were shipped all over the country for use in the manufacture of fiberglass. It is also believed that glass marbles may have been used for ease in rolling freight and cargo around. This only explains the sea glass marble locale when a rail yard is situated near or along a waterfront. Reason #4 : If you are beachcombing near a coastal landfill site, you will have more luck in finding a coveted sea glass marble. Painters often dropped a handful of marbles into a can of paint to help mix the batch. When the paint was used up and the can was tossed into the city dump (often times the dump was the sea-bluffs at the edge of town) the salt water and ocean's natural biodegrading ability decomposed the paint can over the years. The marbles became what was left and each washed around upon the shore until individually beach combed. Reason #5 : Ship's ballast? For hundreds of years, ships and cargo vessels were loaded with heavy items to help provide ballast. Marbles may have provided this weight inexpensively and effectively when the boxes or barrel containers were transported in the hull of a ship. The Marble Collectors Society of America writes "Clay marbles were made in both Germany and the US. It has been reported that clay marbles were used as ballast in the keels of ships that sailed to America from Germany and then were removed and sold in the US". In the Puget Sound where the tides move fast and the inlets can be narrow, ballast is key to keeping a sailing vessel upright and true. It reminds me of the white water rafting trips my family goes on down the remote Hell's Canyon in Idaho's back-country. The heavier, more weighted-down boats fare much better in the turbulent rapids than the lighter rafts. Ships along the Pacific Ocean's rough shore also needed this kind of weight to help with navigability. Yet should they be smashed upon the rocks, the boxes of ballast marbles would surely be lost to sea only to wash up on shore decades and sometimes even centuries later. "A sea glass collecting friend of mine, Stephanie in the Virgin Islands messaged me multiple times with a story of how, one blessed day, she found more than just one or two marble finds. She was trying to solve the mystery of why the marbles ended up there on the beach. She was hiking along a shore that was lined with steep, sandy cliffs, One afternoon she discovered one or two marbles up higher on the beach bank, above that day's high tide line! Then she discovered another that led her up, away from the water's edge to yet another. She kept walking and continued to find them! Eventually she found herself staring directly into the cliff face. With no tools, she had nothing but her bare hands, she decided to dig into the clay-like cliff's side. In just a couple scoops of sand, she said, several marbles came tumbling down, right out of the cliff wall itself at about waist height! Stephanie did some research and believes that they may have been poured out there years, and years before she even visited that beach. She'd heard early stories of the rum runners during the late 1800's that carried barrels on sloops back and forth throughout the Caribbean to fill with alcohol. She shared stories of how the barrels were oftentimes filled with heavy items prior to their pickup so that the ships had heavy ballast." - The Ultimate Guide to Sea Glass At West Coast Sea Glass, we occasionally let go of one of our beautiful, antique sea glass marbles. They can be found on this page: Collector's Rarities

West Coast Sea Glass

Genuine Sea Glass Jewelry and Bulk Sea Glass