Deborah May can find the raw materials for her trade by walking along a beach.
The Port resident makes jewelery from seas glass, those shiny polished prisms that the ocean brings in with sand and stones.
May started making jewelry with sea glass about four years ago, after having collected it on and off for the last two decades. Sea glass comes from various bottles, including wine, soda, medicine, and even perfume. It’s origin ranges from shipwrecks to bottles thrown from boats, including during the prohibition. The glass spends decades and even centuries in the sea. May has even found ceramics and pieces of glass that came from the 1700s.
“Everything used to be in glass,” May said. She recalls finding cobalt Novema glass, tops of old milk bottles and pieces of Coca-Cola bottles from the 1950s.
She first became acquainted with sea glass on the French Riveria, when walking on the beach and her four year old son pointed it out to her. “I thought it looked like a jewel and that the color and texture were very beautiful,” May said. From there, whenever she visited family in Europe she collected it, turning out necklaces, bracelets, and pins.
The search for sea glass is as rewarding as making jewelry from it for May.
“Looking for it a walking meditation and a healing for me,” she said. “You empty your mind of everything and have a single focus with the waves as a backdrop. There is also probably one piece of sea glass among a thousand small pebbles, so you really have to stay focused to find it.”
May also loves the mystery behind sea glass. “You just don’t know where it came from,” she said. “It could be from a sugar bowl in somebody’s kitchen in the 1930s, or from a bottle of whiskey from across the Atlantic in England.”
May didn’t begin turning the objects into jewelry until a few years ago when she started finding it on the North Shore, including around Port Washington.
“My husband told me it was getting kind of excessive, how much sea glass I was collecting, so I thought of what ways i could use it,” May said.
She started making mosaic picture frames and candle holders from the glass and giving them as gifts to friends. Then she asked a jeweler friend how to drill glass and that was the e beginning of “my new passion,” May said of her creating sea glass jewelry. “My children were grown and it gave me the time and energy to put into my creative work.”
He best experiences come when women choose to buy a piece of jewelry and have a personal story to accompany it, May said. “People tell me their stories about their past and their history with sea glass.”
May keeps her art work reasonably priced, charging $35 to $50 for a pair of earings and $35 to $70 for a necklaces. “I try to keep my prices low,” May says. “It’s still hard economic times.”
She sells her jewelry at the Dolphin Bookshop in Port and Practice Body Mind and Soul in Roslyn. She is also rolling out a website www.portseaglass.com, where her work can be viewed and sells at crafts fairs on Long Island.
