| Making
Your Own Sand As well as collecting sand in the
traditional manner, there is another way of adding sand to
your collection, making your own. Sand is made from a
variety of materials with quartz being perhaps the most
common, followed by organic remains such as coral and shell fragments.
Both these materials are broken down naturally into sand by
processes such as weathering and the action of wind and
wave. You can make your own sand by simulating these processes
ourselves. I first came upon this idea when searching an
exposure along the River South Esk, near Dalkieth. Here I
found a couple of cream coloured sandstone boulders that
were soft and almost decomposed back into pure sand, they were
so soft that it was easy to crush a sample by hand. Two fine
samples were collected that day and added to the collection. Sandstone
is one of the most obvious sources for making your own sand
and a huge range of colours can be found, from almost pure
white to deep red and every shade in between, even black can
be found. Simply crushed with a
hammer or handy rock and then sieved they can be added to your collection. Other rocks such
as chalk can also be dealt with in the same manner. Chalk
creates a very nice white sand when crushed. As well as
crushing stone to create sand, seashells from the beach can
also be used to make sand with different colours of shell
producing different shades of sand. Purists might disagree
with producing sand in this manner but there really is no
reason why you should not. It gives you another dimension to
your collecting and the gathering of the raw materials,
stone and seashells, can be done at the same time as
collecting your sand samples. You might wish to create a
separate collection of sand created this way. Remember,
there are no rules about sand collecting, only those that
you create yourself. Crushing
rocks such as sandstone to create sand is fairly straight
forwards. Simple place a small rock sample inside a strong
polythene bag and crush with a hammer until most of the
specimen is crushed. Then use a 2.00 mm sieve to remove
fragments above 2.00 mm in size. If you want finer sand, repeat
the process again or use a good quality mortar and pestle to
grind the sand down further. |
