Sorting Shells

Took a little time today to sort thru the shells I picked up on my recent trip to Florida. I will post about my trip and more details about the shells in the next couple of weeks. I did add around a dozen new kinds of shells, many from Sanibel Island, but also from the Atlantic. I swish newly acquired shells through a container of water; then once home I soak them in a weak bleach water mixture for 15 minutes. Don't want any lingering marine smells. Even so, as I laid them out to sort, I had grains of sand on my table.

The glass sitting on the newspaper is a cylinder vase I bought at a thrift store for $2. Have to have more room to store and display the shells. However, I will go through my other two containers and discard some shells, replacing them with better specimens. The little white plate that holds the olive shells I bought at the same thrift shop for fifty cents. It has a sea shell pattern around the rim. I am pretty sure I am going to leave the olives, sea urchin test, and sea glass on the plate for display purposes. An interesting task to decide which shells go into the 3 containers awaits.