Five Natural Crafts to Make Using Seashells

decorating a shell-covered sand castleOn our vacation, even taking care to collect shells ethically, my little girls and I ended up with at least a bucket of seashells.

First, of course, we’ll use the shells in our homeschool–cleaning, sorting, identifying, labeling, and displaying them. We’ve got big plans for studying the life cycle and anatomy of the bivalve, and the ocean biome in general, and so you can’t have too many shells for that!

In my house, however, homeschooling only just barely wins out over crafting in terms of priorities, and so you can bet that at least half of our seashells are going to end up sacrificed to the greater good that is the handmade project.

Do you have a seashell collection just burning a hole in whatever closet you stuffed it in after your last vacation? Put those souvenirs to use, and create a handmade object that will forever remind you of your special vacation. Here are five crafty projects to get you started:

seashell display box A good way to show off an entire collection (and a good way to use up a whole bunch of shells at one time), is this seashell display box, tutorial courtesy of Craftlicious, turns a boring plain shadow box into a work of art with embellishment.

The key here is to use stash paints and scrapbook supplies to really personalize your shadow box–you could also use photos or postcards from your vacation to make this project really special.

If you don’t already have an old shadow box taking up room somewhere in your house, haunt this summer’s garage sales, or use the kind of windowed box that some store-bought items come in.

[The image on this page is the property of Craftlicious.]

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