Longboat Key resident Sher Forrest reflects on her shell art

Turns out, 100 dollars is plenty for a nice, one of kind mirror on Longboat Key. 

Just make sure they’re sand dollars, not the green kind with presidents' pictures. And make sure you have a talent for crafting like Longboat Key resident Sher Forrest, who puts her dollars (the sand ones, again) and other found shells to good use creating mirrors and frames speckled with treasures from the beach. 

“I had amassed so many, and someone said, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ ” Forrest said. 

Forrest compiled her collection on her daily beach walks, which she starts behind her condo building in the gated area of neighborhoods by the Longboat Key Club. She goes north to Zota for a round trip of about eight miles. All the way, she’s collecting shells. The key is to go down at sunrise, she said, and on a recent walk, she filled a grocery bag and her pockets with shells, all before 7:30 a.m. Shelling, as much as her crafting, has become a passion for her. 

“I’ve learned the names of all of them, like worm shells,” Forrest said. “We spent two and a half hours at the seashell museum in Sanibel, and I came home thinking, ‘I’m going to try to do something.’ ” 

Her first project was transforming a large circular mirror that came with her condo. Its wooden trim is now covered in sand dollars, but Forrest took a couple swings at it before hanging it up on the wall. 

“The first one I made, I wasn’t happy with,” Forrest said. “I took it all apart.” 

Once she got the hang of it, she started going to second-hand stores searching for pieces to remake. It’s a low-cost art form, and has resulted in over a dozen pieces by Forrest. 

In addition to her daily beach strolls, she and husband Jay often take a boat over to Egmont Key, where Forrest can search for sand dollars to her heart’s content. She makes sure that the dollars, which are actually alive, are dead before she plucks them up. Alive ones are brown and fuzzy, while dead ones are paler white. Egmont Key is a haven for collecting. 

“The floor looks like a swimming pool,” Forrest said. “It’s covered with them. You can pick them up with your toes.” 

When she gets the sand dollars home, there’s a special solution with which she cleans them before painting them in a thin layer of watered-down Elmer’s glue to make them more rigid and able to stand up to her crafting. The top of the dresser in the spare bedroom in Forrest’s home is lined with drying dollars for her next project. 

Once she starts arranging the shells and sand dollars in her frame, it’s a long time before she starts gluing and committing to any one pattern. She’s hoping to turn her second bedroom into more of a studio, because right now she assembles her pieces by putting the frame on the bed and figuring it out from there. 

“I start letting the shells tell me where they want to be,” Forrest said. 

Forrest doesn’t consider herself an artist, and she has no interest in selling her work. She has made frames and mirrors as gifts for family and friends, and recently her neighbor asked her to make one. More than artistry, she considers her frames to be crafty. Her son is an artist, however. 

“There’s a creative gene somewhere in our family,” Forrest said. 

 As a young flight attendant, Forrest sewed all her own clothes and would take photos of things she saw on her travels, then come home and try to re-create it. Before shells, her medium was pinecones. She’d collect them and make something out of the prickly pieces; a friend of hers still has something Forrest made her 30 years ago. 

These days, Forrest is just hoping to bring a bit of the beach to the lives of those she loves, and her own Florida-blue home is scattered with shell-sheathed frames holding photos of her grandchildren. 

“I’m bringing the color of the gulf into my home,” Forrest said.