Virtual Beachcombing Festival: Scottish Sea Glass - Nicole Lind

hi I'm Nicole event and I make sea glass and Beach pottery jewelry under the name of Talia by the sea I've been collecting sea glass for over 10 years all along the Scottish coastline I'm gonna show you some of my special Beach finds and I'm gonna look at Scottish beach pottery in more detail my husband and I live in Scotland the kingdom of five clusters and Andrews the five coast has over five hundred miles of coastal path and many many beaches what's it like to be sea glassing in Scotland well we have what's sometimes called four seasons and one day so you can find yourself at the beach and the glaring Sun and five minutes later it could start to hail you have to be prepared for that then we also have really rough seas and the North Sea is typically only about ten degrees which is really really cold some brave souls do swim in it but the nice thing about this is that the rougher the sea the better they're collecting so and winter time the best fines get turned ups things like shooter marbles you can maybe find in the winter so that's the best time to come to Scotland it's gonna be cold though each Beach has something different to offer some beaches you large chunky pieces of sea glass others smaller more rounded pieces and others again have many shells or sea pottery each tight will change the beach completely and sometimes instead of pebbles and sea glass you might find only sand and very little sea glass here's a handful of beach fines from the five coasts to give you an idea of the things you can find at our beaches on a good day you can find sea pottery maybe a clay or record marble a stopper or a little beat you can also find a couple of pieces of blue sea glass and maybe some pirate sea glass okay so we've seen the kind of things that you can find where I live but one thing that we haven't really gone into detail about SC pottery and I'm really passionate about other stuff so let's have a look at the the Scottish sea pottery and its background in history we are going to focus on the period between 1835 when sponge ware was invented in Scotland until the 1930s when production ceased there were around fifty Potteries on the west coast in the Glasgow area and at least ten Potteries all in on either side of the Firth of Forth around the Edinburgh area and on the Fife site these were the largest and very busy Potteries but there were also smaller potteries further up north all the way up to Aberdeen Potter is in Scotland began mass production in around 1835 workers were moving from place to place from factory to factory up and down the coasts children as young as ten were called half timers and they were also working in the Potteries coal was used to fire the kilns and you needed 12 tonnes of coal just to fire one kiln now we are talking millions of teapots and plates that were produced in just one Factory on the east coast of Scotland of course with mass production comes waste now what did the police do with their broken piece of pottery back in Victorian times it was quite normal to actually just dump the broken pieces of pottery nearby on beach dumps that's lucky for us today because twice a day the tides come in and out and they wash the pottery back and forth and they make it really nice and smooth broken pieces turn into really smooth lovely pieces of pottery that we can now collect by the beach where I collect there is a little river and you can actually hear the pottery and that sounds like the river sings there's a clinky clinky sound and you can see the pottery pieces and you can beat through the river and every now and again you maybe find a really nice lovely piece of pottery that might have just been taken out to the North Sea well you can also find our town supports now what account supports that's these little triangles and other bits of kind of pottery that you can find and they were used inside the kilns to stop the pottery from second whilst they were firing the plates and teapots and now you can find these little really really sturdy pieces of gemstones and I personally I love to collect the little pyramids most when the production was in full swing the expert market was really really huge and if you've ever found a piece of sponge where on your Beach on the other side of the world it's likely that may have been produced in Scotland pieces were exported to the yes Australia South Africa Canada Cuba and a lot of these countries didn't actually have their own production there were a couple of factories in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey who produced sponge where in 1880 now what I thought was really cool was when we were in Sydney and I saw a couple of pieces of pottery in a museum and they are the same kind that you can find here on the five coast now sometimes you might find a piece for worry and has a makers mark on it now these are really rare and although you might find a piece that has a London makers mark on it it's actually the distributor he put it Leah and it might have been a piece of Scottish sponge beer so that's the mystery soft why do you find a piece of sponge we're on a u.s. beach and it looks exactly like the pieces in Scotland it was probably produced here pottery production in the time that we're talking about was always continuous and they were also major social disruption I was the first world war was followed by the depression and then the miners strike now the miners mind the cold that was used to fire the kilns and when they went on strike a lot of the Potteries that was made for big orders couldn't be fired which meant that all the orders had to be canceled and in the time space between 1928 and 1932 all the Potteries on the five coasts and beyond closed we had a look at the history and now we're going to have a look at patterns and printing techniques in the years before plastic almost all household items were made from pottery the earliest pieces of sponge we were made in Scotland around 1835 and subsequently copied in neighboring countries it was made until the 1930s Scotland England and Holland were the main exporters of sponge we're but what is sponge where the farm root of a marine sponge was cut into basic shapes or tied to form a particular shape the sponge was dipped into color and repeatedly pressed onto plates teapots and other everyday tableware sink potato printing some pre-made spawn shapes were purchased from a large manufacturer which explains the similarity in patterns all over Scotland and beyond it's relatively quick to produce and apply and has a homely charm most patterns are actually sponge wear with a hand-painted finish these are sponge wear examples that you can see here another finish you're likely to find at the beaches transfer where transfer wear was meet with transfer printing the design was etched onto a copper plate transferred to tissue paper hence the name and then ruled onto the item some patterns were made and printed at the Potteries other designs were bought in there were hundreds of transfer patterns available at the time the famous willow pattern was made by at least ten Potteries and Scotland patterns were rarely named at the time and most items did have make us marks on the bone but one of the few named patterns that was named is called Gretchen meanly made angry but also in blue brown crimson lilac and navy it was made by several potteries in both sponge and transferware I have found several pieces in gray and have tried to recreate a plate so we had a look at transphobia and sponge way earlier and I told you about different types of patterns like there was a blue willow pattern and the Gretchen pattern now what's really interesting is that you get lots of geometric patterns here and they tended to be on the borders of items and I find it really fascinating that you can really see how the sponges were applied to the pottery to get the patterns there's also lots of floral patterns here there are all different types of flowers but you can find some things that you can find different charts and they have the same pattern so that's really fascinating for me when you find a pattern that matches another one that you maybe find a couple of years ago and there's also this cute little bow here that I've got agree and a red piece off so you know that the same sponge was used for different colors we looked at patterns and printing techniques earlier now what kind of color can you expect to find on the beach most likely you're going to find a lot of white powdery followed by what was the most popular color at the time well that would be blue pottery and then it's getting real and Riera so there's going to be Jean Brown a little bit of red and one of the rarer colors is purple and then it's probably yellow I think I only have about two pieces of yellow pottery some of the various finds and also the most exciting ones are if you find a piece of white pottery and you turn it around and it has is a pictorial piece which has this one has half a lady on it so those are the finds that are really really exciting use a selection of some of my best wines from Scottish coast now there is a little gaming dice here it's plastic but it's a really cool find there are some beads here that you can maybe also find it's even a heart-shaped one shooter marbles really rare stopper nice piece of ambarina and this is one of my most treasured finds it's less this little check cracker charm I was probably a cat or a little buckle I like to keep my finds in these art deco jars so what I really like to do is I like to collect these pottery bases teapot pieces also found at the beach and I put these Stoppers or marbles on them there's a bit clear marble and the cat's eye marble from the beach and you can have these all dotted around the house and its really nice way of reusing based materials to make cute little this piece it's been great talking to you and I really enjoyed showing you must go to beach fines bye

Channel: Beachcombing Magazine

Views: 2,010

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: sea glass, seaglass, beach glass, beachglass, glassing, beach comber, beachcomber, beach combing, beachcombing, beach, beachcomb, beach comb, beachcombing magazine, beachcombingmagazine, ocean, scotland, scottish, sea pottery, pottery, history, spongeware, transferware, blue willow

Id: 7gqgI6AUyTg

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020