Multi-Year Project

Two years ago I started working on this table. I can only work on it summers when we head to the house in CA. I don’t think I have any “before” pictures... My grandmother made the original version. She used resin to glue tumbled glass to the plexiglass panels. Over time (a lot of time), the resin became yellow and brittle, and a lot of the glass had fallen off. The table needed an upgrade, but how? Mom and I spent years (literal years) figuring out how to proceed, and decided to start with new plexiglass. The pieces were custom cut for us. Then I worked on scraping the glass off the old panels and ended up with a lot of bandaids on my fingers. Using silicone (clear, for bathroom, tub, and tile) I started gluing down the glass I'd been able to scrape off the old table.

That first year, I only finished one middle and one end piece of the table before I ran out of material. I needed a LOT more glass. But I didn't have a glass tumbler, and I had no luck turning one up from friends and neighbors. So that year went by, and my mother was in a bad car accident in April, so I didn't work on the table at all that next summer.

But after we got home we finally managed to borrow a rock tumbler, and then -- miraculously! -- I managed to acquire a second one. I ran the rock tumblers day and night for months and made a whole shoe box full of "sea" glass. Which still wasn't nearly enough.

But, wait! Where do we get our glass?

Dark blue is Skyy vodka, a certain brand of (terrible) prosecco, a vase I found at the thrift store for $3, and a bottle of mineral water.
Green comes from beer bottles (Clausthaler near-beer) and certain red wine bottles (not the brownish green, the lighter green), and an olive oil bottle. Light blue is Bombay Sapphire gin.
Clear, well, clear glass bottles are found anywhere and everywhere -- white wine, "pink" wine (rose), vodka, gin, sparkling water...

You may be wondering how I'm doing. My liver is just fine, thank you. Yes, we're drinkers, but we've had a lot of help from family and friends. And I can be pretty persuasive about getting people to save bottles for me.

Above: These are the sections I finished the first year.

Above: My process takes over a big section of the table.

My glass

In process -- It's flipped upside down so I can work on it. I use a dry erase marker to sketch out my design on the top before I flip it over and start sticking glass to the bottom.

This is how I left it after this summer. Only one and a half panels to go!