Treasure Hunting and
Wire-Work Projects.
Yesterday we decided to go for a walk, I wish we’d had the camera so I could show you where we went. It’s down on the banks of a nearby river and it’s absolutely beautiful there. On a sunny day there really is no beating it. It’s always been one of my favourite walks. We were treated to ducks and teeny tiny ducklings bobbing around on the water. A lucky start for them, if they’d hatched two or three weeks ago they’d be snow-duckies.
Anyway, we wandered around the gravelly banks going ‘Ooh!’ at the pretty stones, falling sideways into shallow water occasionally and filling our pockets with what we call ‘treasure.’ Horace found huge rocks and tried to smash them with other rocks to see if there was anything inside them. One stone he found sparkled when chips came off it, I think it was probably quartz. As for me, I trawled the ground for river glass, it’s like sea glass, but worn by the rivers motion. It’s lovely stuff, all soft edged and sparkly amongst the pebbles. Sausage kept finding really huge stones and nearly dropped quite a few on his toes. All of us filled pockets and enjoyed just being outside and in the fresh air.
I walked home feeling like I had really heavy buttocks because my jeans pockets at the back were full of rubble. Put it this way, I was grateful that my jeans were held up with a good sturdy belt. Here’s what we ended up with:
All carefully washed and dried. Spot the old metal helicopter part, useless but I couldn’t help but pick it up.
Once cleaned up I bobbed what I could in a jar, they look so pretty all jumbled up.
Treasure! Old pottery, river glass, sparkly quartz, stripy stones.
I was so pleased to see that amongst our find were a couple of small loops of wire, probably left over from fencing. I’m really into making jewellery at the moment, especially wire-wrapping so I loved the idea of being able to make things entirely sourced from rubbish…..or treasure as we know it.
This brown river glass glows amber when the light shines from behind it. I used pliers to shape and pull the wire together.
This is made with copper wire I already own. Wire-wrapping is surprisingly easy and effective looking. Anyone who knows what they’re doing will be able to see my rubbish links etc, but to the untrained eye, it doesn’t look so bad I think.
The wibbles, as I call them, are a way of tightening the wire around the glass so it doesn’t come loose.
This is made with finer copper wire, possibly a little fussy but I do love making swirls.
Brown river glass seems a lot harder to find. I do wonder how many years these have been rolling around on the bottom of the river. I think they’ve seen many fishes, floods and ducks in their time. (as they have eyes…..obviously!)
Green copper wire, you have to be so careful not to scratch off the coating when you use this. It does help to bring out the hint of emerald in the glass though.
Most of these are too heavy to be used in jewellery, I think that they look better as window hangings or maybe garden ornaments. The sunshine brings out their natural jewel colours.
The main problem with this river glass is when you go hunting for it, you do have to be careful what you pick up. Having lacerated hands does not make for great crafting, so if you do decide to have a go at this, please do be careful and remember to wash your hands and the glass, pebbles or bits of pottery before you do anything with it. Rivers, although pretty, can be pretty mucky places.
Not a great photograph and they’d have looked nicer if the sun had been shining. The colours stand out so much more when these have back-lighting. I did spend ages trying to space these out so you could see each separate one, but it was frankly impossible.
This is what I’ve been doing instead of housework. Typical. So Horace doesn’t have any clean socks washed, but he has some mega-cool window hangings instead. He is very pleased as you can imagine.
