bumblebee

Whoah that big euro swirl just silenced the room.

Hah! After I convinced myself it wasn't a contemporary remake, I let out a shandababa or two myself.

...it would tell me how on earth it stayed mint and made its way into a $20 jar of beat up vintage marbles. Either way, I'm not complaining! (I am, however, tempted to ask the booth seller if they have more of these somewhere in an old box...) FullSizeRender.MOV

Wow that really puts an extra twist on this day! Is that other one a MK "beach ball" ?

Is the other a Whitie for a whitie Christmas?

That's a perfect Christmas cork!

Wow a spotted dick soccer ball. That's not something I've ever seen out in the wilds of America. The swirl gets my patented "WV swirl" shrug. This thread is getting me into the holiday spirit. Time to hang Christmas lights!

Hi, any collector would be happy to get genuine stone marbles from the 16th through 19th century, although most are very dull shades of gray and brown. I don't know that I'd pay more than $20 for a small pile of them unless it had a lot of variety or interesting colors. Some prettier antique "marble marbles" and pinkish "blood alley" types with red lines are certainly worth a few $ each though I rarely see them for sale. My personal favorite are the dyed hand cut and polished German agate marbles from the late 19th century, especially the bullseye types with high contrast bands. Typical nice examples fetch $5 to $30 each but fancy examples in bigger sizes or rarer colors like green and blue can command $40 to $60 each or more on occasion. Note that these are vintage ones evidenced by the hand-faceting channels visible on the surface under strong light or a loupe. Some vintage marble collectors also fancy the contemporary mineral spheres which some would call marbles, simply for their beauty.

That's a purty Jabo. I admire your self-control. I cannot imagine being this patient with marble mail!

Very nice. If anything it has the spirit of oxblood.

Ace Moss Agate Jolly Ringer

Agreed. She needs to sweat a little bit more than from just opening them. So far it's been mostly Vitty but today I'm seeing a monster Akro.

Gettin' Vittie wit it!

Your own Alley marble dig complete with original factory dirt isn't too shabby for being naughty. That's a nice little hive of bees! Now comes the hard part: waiting and resisting peeking.

Wow! That looks like great fun but do you (or any of us) have the patience to only open one compartment per day? Shuddering to think what might be in that stocking, though. Be careful! 😁

Very nice marble. Would seem an odd size to produce for a contemporary maker?

That is basically my theory. I don't think the collecting community at large fully appreciates what you just observed, that when Vacor does use higher quality glass, the resulting eye appeal in many cases is up there with some top shelf CACs. I know my finding two among another collector's Vacor lot is anecdotal and could have been his bias from cherry picking, but the eBay photos I showed earlier were not from a collector. In other words, he simply had a small handful of older Vacors. I stumbled upon them searching for Michaelangelo and immediately recognized these fellows. If I worked for Vacor right now I'd see a tremendous opportunity to release limited edition Premium Glass runs. 😀

Wow lots of aventurine on yours and what appears to be a big 9.

In hand it does not look handmade to me. Under a loupe its surface texture is exactly like that of those sharp Twisters I posted. Surface is covered with many small dimples. Looks very much like the 9/16" Dragon surface I got in the same lot. I don't have a lot of contemporary handmades, but the ones I looked at were extremely smooth with almost no dimpling. Here's all the views from that eBay auction of vacors that appears to have two of these and a 3rd oddball.

The forum will now accept (and re-size) images of any size, so no worries about shrinking images in order to post. I got two "Twisters" from the same guy who had the mystery marbles, and the quality of the glass had people assuming I had CACs at the show. I wonder if Vacor produces first run or "design run" versions of a given marble using the highest quality glass in order to create an ideal representation of the marble, then mass produces it using the cheaper glass. That's speculation to a degree, but it's widely known the early runs us higher quality glass.

Here's mine thanks to the iPhone. mystery_vacor_or_what.mov

Do you have photos of yours, especially the nine and tail you see? I seem to recall that some people were calling these "German circus" at one point but there was also another type of colorful marbles (with seams, maybe?) that others called a German circus.

Thanks for sharing more of your photos. My hunch equals your hunch. That being said, the examples I have found of the extremely vivid ones are all closer to 9/16" than 5/8". I sure wish we had insider knowledge from Vacor employees who could give insights.

It was a seller who had compiled his own box of Vacors, so definitely not original stock boxes. I only got two and then traded one so I've only seen two in hand.

He said he has "similar" but wants to search around to find them.