Beach Treasures

We went to the beach over the 2025 winter holidays. It's the perfect time to go: no risk of sunburn, you don't have to swim, and there's hardly anyone else around. 

During the trip I spent many hours wandering up and down the beach, seeking out treasures to use in my pigment making. I ended up finding a veritable rainbow of shells, rocks and coral. Definitely the best beach haul yet.

At first I was only looking for orange scallop shells, but once you start playing a Skyrim Alchemist IRL, you find a lot more. Over the course of the four day trip I became pretty good at spotting scallop shells in any colour. I found yellow ones, orange ones, purple ones and red ones, in all sorts of sizes from ~3mm up to 40mm.

On the third day I found some purple sea urchin spines, which turned out to be absolutely everywhere but because I hadn't been hunting for them, I didn't notice them until I started looking. The spines are brittle and are made mostly out of calcium, so after grinding them up, I'm dissolving the powder in some vinegar to remove the calcium and leave the pigment — whatever mystery substance it is — behind. 

My intent for the scallop shells is to do the same thing once they have been sorted into colour groups.

I also now know way more about scallops and sea urchins than I ever needed to, like the fact that scallops have 200 eyes, and sea urchins walk with tube feet. Thank god they're only small and live in the sea. Can you imagine what kind of nightmare fuel giant ones would be?

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A photo of scallop shells ranging in colour from yellow to orange, to pink to grey.
Photograph of a 25 scallop shells in various colours from white to yellow, orange, red and purple. A row of purple sea urchin spines. A row of slightly faded purple sea urchin spines. Grinding up sea urchin spines in a mortar and pestle. Ground up sea urchin spines.