Losing my mind but not my marbles

I've always loved coloured glass of all kinds. I grew up surrounded by coloured glass as my mom has a really pretty collection of small glass pieces that she keeps in a sunny window on the inside porch off the kitchen. Many a morning I'd be munching on my cereal, transfixed by the sun shining through the beautiful cobalt, ruby, amber, emerald and amethyst pieces. My hometown, Sandwich, used to have a functioning glass factory for a few brief years in the mid-1800's. It shut down after only a short time, and Sandwich glass is now one of the most expensive kinds of collectible glass you can find. I even saw a pair of Deming Jarves dolphin candlesticks in the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, which surprised me.

So it's no surprise that I fell in love with marbles. I would never, ever play "keepsies" with the other kids because I didn't want to lose my precious marbles to anyone. I had a very small bag of marbles until my First Communion in 1972. My Aunt Glady & Uncle Yimmy couldn't make the trip up from Yonkers for the big event, but they sent a gift that I will never forget. Marbles. Loads and loads of them. I'm not sure what the story was, but I think someone they knew was getting rid of the collection so they asked if they could have it to give to me. Here are the regular cats eye-type:

These are glass but they call them "aggies", since old marbles were made from agate.

It seems that marble terminology varies from region to region. I've heard these called "shooters" but where I grew up, we called them "boulders". The really super large marbles we called "jumbos".

These are my very favourite kind of marble. Again, in my area we called them "crystals" but they are also called "clearies" because you can see through them.Here are some that were given to me by friends.



I bought these in an antique store in Sebastopol, CA. Nothing too valuable, just your basic pretty marbles from the 1950's, including an old metal jack and jingle bell.

This is a collection I got off eBay really cheap.

I bought this jar of them at an antique show in Tacoma a few years ago.

Now we are getting into the "cream of the crop" when it comes to serious collecting. I paid A LOT of money for this large, 2" sulphide of a dog, but I wanted to have at least one near-mint sulphide. They are extremely expensive because they are very old. I've seen them sell for up to $1,500 and higher. Some marble makers have gone back to making sulphides, but the antiques are the ones I really love. They may not look like much, but every serious collector needs at least one sulphide in their collection! I have 3 sulphides, which is about all I can afford. This is another dog. The third smaller one has a chicken.

These are called "onionskins" and they too are very old, usually made in Germany. When I say "old", I am talking early late 19th to early 20th century.

These are called "swirls" and they are most often German as well, and produced in the same time period as onionskins. They usually have a latticino core surrounded by the swirls of colour.

But when I see a modern-era art marble, I often can't resist buying one.

Or two.

Or three.....These are super old "Bennington Clays". This particular set was found somewhere near a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. Most Benningtons were produced in the mid-1800's, but unlike the German glass marbles, they are not terribly expensive or valuable.

Finally, this set of 6 oddly shaped marbles are ones that I made a couple of years ago. I took a marblemaking class at The Bead Factory in Tacoma and lemme tell ya, it's really hard to make a perfectly round marble. Mine don't roll, so much as wobble. But hey, at least I can say that I made marbles!