Great art is often born of pain, and for any mother there is no greater agony than the loss of a child. Shortly after moving to Rhode Island in 2007, Georgia Hitti and her husband, Brandon, got some terrible news while she was pregnant with her second baby: the unborn child had a severe birth defect that would make his survival unlikely. Hitti made the decision to carry the child to term, and part of the pregnant mom’s strategy for coping with the uncertainty was to take long walks on the beach. “All I could do was wait,” she recalls.
Unfortunately, the baby did not beat the odds, but all those days on the beach had found her collecting sea glass along with her thoughts. When the pregnancy ended, Hitti began looking into the possibility of making sea glass jewelry, partly as a legacy for the son whose brief life had rekindled her passion for art.
As her family grew with a second child, then a third, Hitti decided that in addition to home-schooling her kids (Sicily, now six; Gavin, four; and Annalise, two) she would take the leap into starting a jewelry business. Three to five days a week, mornings are devoted to schoolwork while afternoons are spent walking the rocky beaches of Jamestown – prime territory for collecting beach glass. “We make a nature outing out of it,” she says. “The kids are sometimes better at finding glass than me.”
Beach glass doesn’t occur naturally; rather, time and the action of waves over rocks and sand smoothes the sharp edges off pieces of discarded drink bottles, cosmetic containers and other glassware. Brown and white are fairly common colors; more prized are sea-foam green (typically from old Coke bottles) and cobalt blue (remnants of shattered Noxema containers). Red is rarest of all; much of it can be traced to the bottom glass used in Schlitz beer bottles back in the 1960s.
It takes the sea decades to tumble such trash into treasure, but for artists like Hitti, sea glass is the ultimate renewable resource – new supplies are washed ashore daily. A typical one- to two-hour outing at low tide can yield 50-100 pieces of glass, with the best hunting coming during the full moon when tides are slackest, and in winter when fewer people are out combing the beach. Hitti also looks for bits of broken pottery, occasionally finding pieces of blue-on-white china that likely dates back to the 19th century. Anything with a sharp edge is tossed back so the sea can finish its relentless work.
Hitti crafts each piece into a unique work of art, using non-tarnishing silver-plated wire to wrap the unaltered glass and adorn it with spirals and beads before attaching it to a necklace or a mount for earrings. Pieces typically sell for $10-$15 each and can be found online at Etsy.com and locally at the Biomes Marine Education Center in North Kingstown, the Fayer- weather House in Kingston, Maxwell’s Made in America in Wickford and at a variety of craft shows.
“I want people to be able to afford to buy it and wear it,” Hitti says. “If you come here from Nebraska or somewhere you can take back a one-of-a-kind item that’s completely Rhode Island.”
Hitti describes her work as “addictive” and “healing,” and each piece she creates represents a shard of memory for a small life never fully lived, but not forgotten. “It’s not as painful anymore,” she says of the loss of her first son. “It’s how this all started, so that’s how I think of it. I’ll always think about him when I’m working.”
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