Sea glass picture of a Jersey beach

I thought I would show off something I have made for myself for a change. My family has spent our summer holiday on the beautiful island of Jersey for the last couple of years. I am not normally a beach kind of person (I would much rather be exploring the cliff tops), but there is one particular beach that I particularly like exploring in Jersey. It is the beach where I manage to find lots and lots of sea glass. The sea glass pieces are formed by the sea tumbling and eroding broken glass bottles and the resulting pieces can be found in a variety of colours and shapes.

One of our favourite Jersey beaches

During our summer holiday to Jersey in 2012 we collected a bag of sea glass and it has taken me about a year to finally have something made with it. We decided that we would produce a mosaic type picture of a Jersey beach. I had a bright idea of mounting the sea glass onto the glass front of a picture frame so that we could somehow shine a light behind it to illuminate the colours. The picture frame is a driftwood effect box frame and measures 22” x 18”, each piece of sea glass was individually glued onto the glass (tip: the best and cheapest glass glue I found is Wilkinson’s own glass glue, believe me I used a lot of it!).The picture represents a Jersey beach, flanked by the green cliff tops and tumbling rocks.

Sea glass picture of a Jersey Beach

For the lighting I purchased a LED strip lighting kit. This kit consisted of a flexible 5m strip of LEDs that was easily cut to size and it was sticky backed so attaching to the inside of the box frame was easy!

LED Strip Lighting Kit

The only problem I had was that the individual LEDs were visible, especially when viewing the picture from side on. To reduce this problem I mounted a card border behind the glass.

Illuminated sea glass picture

The LED kit also comes with a remote control with lots of colour options and effects such as colour fading, brightness control and even a strobe function (which our little boy had lots of fun playing with).

Picture lit up with LED strip lighting

I hope you like it! I am now planning what to do with all of the sea glass I collected from a jersey beach during this summer’s holiday.

Mick