Sea glass collector Susan Garrity sifts through rocks looking for sea glass last month. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

CAPE ELIZABETH — On a recent afternoon at low tide, Susan Garrity slowly paced the rocky beach of Pond Cove.

With the sun on her back, she bent and combed her fingers through sea-tossed stones that were hot to the touch. She picked and prodded until she found something shiny and colorful.

Sea glass collector Susan Garrity shows off some of her finds while collecting at a Cape Elizabeth beach in July. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Triumphantly, she displayed a speck of red sea glass in the palm of her hand. “It’s so itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny,” she said.

She placed the tiny specimen in her bag along with other bits of glass. She comes to the cove four or five times a week.

“I never go anywhere without a bag,” she said, “because I never know what I’m going to find.”

Garrity, who is 63 and retired, considers herself a scavenger and a gatherer. Every day since January, she said, she’s spent an hour or two scouring local beaches for sea glass, sea pottery and driftwood – treasures she’s collected her entire life.

“Some people sit at the beach to get a suntan,” Garrity said. “I walk and find sea glass.” She said she likes to stay until the “tide chases me out.”

Maine’s coastline is ideal for the weathering and collection of sea glass, said Richard LaMotte, who has written books on the subject. As shards of glass zigzag down the rocky shores and in and out of rugged coves, the turbulent waves create an “abrasive environment” that produces that sought-after frosted texture, he said.

Finding sea glass has become a national hobby in the past two decades, LaMotte said.

“It’s like adult Easter egg hunting,” he said.

LaMotte sees sea glass as a “vanishing gem” because of increased interest, rising sea levels and the heavy use of plastic instead of glass.

Still, some dedicated Mainers continue to grow their vast collections and come up with creative ways to showcase their finds.

Garrity calls herself a “sea glass addict.” She loves searching in winter, when the beaches are empty, but she got frostbite in a few of her fingers when she did it in January.

“My husband thinks I’m crazy,” she said with a laugh. But “he’s very good at carrying a book bag of rocks, like a mule.”

Some of Susan Garrity’s favorite pieces of sea glass she has collected over the years. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Garrity has met other collectors on her forays. Susan Chase, who lives in Falmouth and has a home in Biddeford, was in Cape Elizabeth doing a house inspection while studying to be an appraiser when she decided to stop at a beach off of Shore Road. She could tell that Garrity “was also rustling” for sea glass, and they struck up a conversation.

Chase, like Garrity, has always beachcombed, but a few years ago, she went back at it in earnest “with the intention of finding sea glass.” Her best find: an intact 2-ounce Foss’ liquid fruit flavors’ bottle from 1910, complete with the cork and contents.

Chase, 60, who is colorblind, looks for “iridescence and different textures in the sand.” It took some training, she said, but she’s very good at it now. She spends a few hours at the beach at low tide once or twice a week, and she brings a garbage bag. “If I’m picking up treasures, I should also pick up the trash,” she said.

After their beach meeting, Chase and Garrity became Facebook friends and started to share sea glass photos. Chase makes elaborate wreaths out of driftwood and shells.

In Garrity’s home, there are sea glass creations in every window on the first floor, and bowls and dishes of sea rocks and sea glass populate many surfaces. As a child, Garrity used to make mobiles with shells and sea glass by winding fishing line around them. Now her creations are more elaborate.

She’s transformed the plain white frames of multiple octagonal mirrors by adding mosaics of sea glass and sea pottery. She searches for mirrors at the dump and consignment shops.

For the past seven years, Garrity has been adding beach rocks and sea glass to the stone foundation that wraps around the house she’s lived in for 40 years.

But some pieces are too special to craft with, she said. Among the jars of green and blue glass that glow in the sun on her kitchen windowsill is one jar with four sea-weathered marbles and an assortment of glass shapes and surprising colors like orange and bright teal.

Jars of sea glass and other treasures sit on display in a window at Susan Garrity’s home in Cape Elizabeth. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

“This is what I’d take with me if my house ever caught fire,” she said as she gently emptied the contents onto a small white towel.

Rare colors like orange, turquoise and yellow usually come from “glass that wasn’t thrown away,” such as tableware, said LaMotte, the sea glass researcher. “If you find a beach that has a lot of variety of color, stay there,” he said, because pieces of glass generally do not travel very far from where they were dumped.

Unique colors also tend to be older, and LaMotte looks at color, glass thickness and shape to date sea glass finds. With enough information, he said, he can estimate age with a 10-year margin of error. Soft purples are usually from before 1915, and light blue from the 1880s and 1890s. After the 1920s and the advent of mass production, he said, greens, whites and browns began to dominate glass waste and thus sea glass.

Garrity’s collection reflects this. She has such a vast supply of translucent clear glass that she’s sorted it into jars by size. Sometimes, she dumps thousands of pieces onto her round kitchen table to sort, comforted by the texture and the sound of the pieces as she moves them. Recently, she’s started filling vials with tiny pieces. One hangs from the rearview mirror her car.

Beachcombing fanatic Susan Garrity’s vials of sea glass at her home in Cape Elizabeth. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Picking up sea glass from Maine beaches is mostly legal, by the way. Jim Brett, spokesperson for Maine State Parks, says that he discourages activities that could endanger the sustainability of natural environments. But the removal of human-made debris like sea glass “may not pose a significant ecological threat when responsibly collected; removing natural driftwood, rocks and sand can disrupt vital habitats for beach flora and fauna.”

However, Amanda Pollock, a spokesperson for Acadia National Park, said park policy does not allow for the collection of natural or cultural objects – and that applies to sea glass.

Amanda Baston, who lives in Orrington, started looking for sea glass two years ago. Now, the corner of her dining room is overrun with plastic bins devoted to different colors. She’s especially proud of the four marbles she’s found. In fact, she said, she screeched when she found her first one a year and a half ago.

“I had to train my brain to look for glass,” she said. But she felt called to it.

Baston, 40, works full time as a medical assistant at Penobscot Community Health Center in Bangor and has three kids – age 12, 13 and 15. She often feels stressed, she said, and searching for sea glass has become “my church, my peace, my solitude.”

She likes to go out at 4:30 in the morning and be on the beach as the sun rises. Her go-to spot is Sears Island.

In winter, she bundles up, wears thick pajama pants and sticks hand warmers in her pockets.

Baston’s husband said that if she was going to bring so much sea glass home, she had to do something with it, she said. So using the pieces she finds, she makes flowers, butterflies and custom designs on canvas or driftwood, which she sells online and sometimes at craft fairs.

Sometimes, she gets teary seeing people enjoying her work.

“I like that I can make something nice out of things people throw away,” Baston said.