When sand doesn't want to become glass
A while ago, I started working on a collaboration with my friend Rosie of Elemental Jewellery. The idea was to make a collection of earrings inspired by place, using sand gathered from beaches and rivers around Aotearoa.
We would create a little library of sands from different places, I would use them to make glass beads, and Rosie would turn those beads into jewellery. Each gallery we worked with could provide sand from somewhere meaningful nearby, and we would make a small collection especially for them.
I was particularly taken with the idea of making something that literally contained a tiny piece of a place. And, because glass is made from sand, I assumed the glassmaking part would be reasonably straightforward. It wasn't.
The problem with sand
The first thing I discovered was that you can't just put any old beach sand into glass and expect it to behave itself.
I started incorporating small amounts of sand into my glass beads, melting it into the molten glass at the torch. The results were beautiful, but the beads kept cracking.
At first, I thought it was something I was doing. I tried different amounts of sand, different ways of encasing it, different shapes and different firing schedules. Some beads looked perfectly fine when they came out of the kiln, only to crack later.
Eventually I realised that it wasn't really the glass that was the problem. It was what was hiding in the sand.
Beach sand isn't just tiny grains of silica. Depending on where it comes from, it can contain all sorts of microscopic inclusions... tiny fragments of shells, minerals and other bits of material. Once trapped inside the glass, those little inclusions can behave very differently from the glass around them as everything heats and cools. And glass is a very unforgiving material.
Finding the right sand
After a lot of experimenting, I only found two sands that behaved beautifully: Piha and Kai Iwi. It's obvious in hindsight. Both are incredibly fine and clean... the type of sand that sticks to your feet.
Finally, I could make the beads I had been imagining.
The sand is added to the molten glass at the torch, then encased and shaped into the bead. Once it's annealed, the sand becomes a permanent part of the glass. You can see it suspended inside, but it's no longer sand that you could brush between your fingers. It's become something else entirely.
A collaboration that changed direction
The original plan was to build up a whole library of sands from different places and create collections specifically for galleries. Rosie would do the silversmithing, and I would make the glass beads.
But after discovering just how difficult the glass beads were to make with most sands, we decided not to pursue the project in quite the way we'd originally imagined.
Rosie has since taken the idea in her own direction, making beautiful cast metal beads using sand. And I've ended up with a small collection of these rather special glass beads.
So the collaboration didn't quite work out as planned, but Rosie and I are firm friends now, and that's even better.
Piha and Kai Iwi
Each pair contains a little piece of one of those beaches, permanently enclosed in glass. They're not intended as souvenirs in the usual sense. They're more like tiny material records of a place, sand transformed by heat and held inside something you can wear.
And perhaps they're also a reminder that the simplest ideas aren't always as simple as they first appear.
I thought I was going to make jewellery from sand. Instead, I spent quite a lot of time learning about why sand doesn't necessarily want to become glass.
