About Us
WELCOME TO OUR PROCESS
We have recycled glass most of our lives at the local recycling center or given it to our friends to use in their business. Recently friends of ours, Mike and Jody Tonder of Blue Skies Glassworks who have recycled glass all of their lives into Arts and Crafts Pieces, decided to retire. We purchased part of their business that involved Beach Glass and Solar Lights and are now growing and expanding it into other forms of Art and Crafts. During the next few months we want to take you through our process of forming these arts and crafts pieces. So keep checking back for for more information on this process.
First we need to prepare the glass jars outer surface. We have stickers that we place on the outside of the jars in the shape of Minnesota state and stars before we sandblast the jars to get a frosted look to the outside. Sometimes we do not use any stickers and just sandblast the outside leaving an area near the base of clear glass for the colors of the Tumbled Beach Glass to show through.
These stickers need to be tough enough not to come off during the sand blasting process. When the sandblasting is accomplished the stickers are peeled off leaving a design in the clear glass.
Once the glass jars are ready for sandblasting, we screw a metal cap onto the jar to prevent the threads from being frosted. This allows us to place the solar cap onto the jars when completed without any difficulties.
The jar is then placed into the sandblaster on a wooden wedge to aid in stabilizing the jar during the process. We do use our hands covered in the gloves to move the jar around. Once the sandblasting is completed the lid is removed and the jar is washed to remove and sand residue and the jar is ready to have the Tumbled Beach Glass placed into the base of the jar. Next we will show you how the Tumbled Beach Glass is created out of recycled glass.
Our recycled beach glass is made out of glass we get from a recycler and place into a cement mixer with steel pieces to break up the glass. We run each batch for about 2 hours to get the desired piece size. Then we take out the steel pieces and add a grit substance and water to smooth the edges and form beach glass like you see on the beach. This can take anywhere from 8 to 10 hours.
Once the glass is done tumbling we empty the mixer onto a 3 level screening process. We need to wash the grit off of the glass and size the pieces for different uses. This enables us to separate the different sizes by the sizes of the screen. The top screen is the largest and then there is a smaller screen. The picture shows the ending screen of smaller pieces.
It takes about 2 – 3 hours to wash off the grit, dry the pieces and separate their sizes before they can be of use.
