Home Decor: How to display Sand & Sea Shells

We all love buying traditional souvenirs on our travels.  I personally love collecting all things natural while traveling. It makes me feel like I am bringing a little piece of that place back with me. But challenge arises when you bring it all home and not sure what to do with it. Here are some ways I have incorporated some of the nature's wonders and made them art.
 

Above are some of the shells I picked up from Costa Rica last year. It would have been nice to just put them in a jar, but I loved the colours and textures of each and every shell that I wanted to showcase them all individually. So I displayed them all in a glass box colour-coordinated and texture-coordinated. This was they look more organized and I love how every shell gets to show off!

 

After that I was still left with some of the longer shells which I had no clue how to display. So I was browsing through Pinterest to get some ideas and came across spray pained metallic shells. That was simply brilliant! I went straight to Michaels and got myself a metallic gold spray and Voila! Gold shells! They looks so precious and so glam even in a small glass bowl.




 

Six months prior to Costa Rica, I went to Maui, where we visited a black sand beach. It was something I had never seen before and I had nothing but a sun glass cover, so filled it up with some black sand and black rocks (crazy, I know). But I struggled for a while to come up with a way to display the rocks and the black sand. Eventually I just separated the two. I placed the black rocks with the gold shells in another glass display box from Indigo. I think the contrast works beautifully! The gold just sparkles next to the black rocks and the black rocks look darker and more coarse with gold shells.

And this brings us to the sand display. As I mentioned I separated the black sand from the rocks above and didn't know what to do with it for a while! Until one day found these candle holders, from Home Outfitters, they were just empty glass cylinders with tea light candle holder on top. Oh have I mentioned I also had desert sand from Rajasthan, India from 10 years ago that I had just sitting around.
So I filled up this big hurricane container with the Rajisthani fine sand, and in placed the candle holders, filled with Hawaiian black sand. Result...perfection!

I was so frustrated with having collected all this sand, rocks and shells and not knowing to diplay it around my home. But when I did find the ways (and right containers) to display all my "natural" collections, it was totally worth the wait.