bumblebee

Corned beef and cabbage and soda bread and Guinness all on the menu today, with a heaping piles of spuds of course. I may nip at a half pint of Irish whiskey later. For leftovers, it's hard to beat corned beef on dill rye bread with mustard.

We don't use the fireplace much. I even cut down my own trees and wood this year. It is very cozy, though. I think I would prefer a wood stove more centrally located. I actually prefer going to the fire pit down by the river and doing a big blaze there. Then you really appreciate it with the cold on your back, the bats silently skimming the water, fish jumping, and the occasional dark shape stepping through the woods or swimming on the water.

Gray, gray, wet, icy, gray, GRAY, dirty snow. Mud. Still, temps are puncturing 45 highs so spring is somewhere nearby. And to think we're considering moving to TX for a complete opposite experience!

Just ordered mine and looking forward to learning more about Pelts.

It wouldn't be worth the effort for me to do the master tapes. Somebody with better equipment would be best suited. That being said, I think these are good enough to start with. Interestingly, YouTube detects the classical music on these as copyrighted and that restricts some devices they can be played on. Also puts ads on some of them. I still may move them to Archive.org for that reason but for starters I'm putting them on YouTube because of their color enhancing features.

Wow, that's a lot of tapes to make. They aren't short but luckily the first one ended literally a minute before my DVD ran out. There are quality/color issues on the tape so here's what I did: 1. Ripped to DVD 2. Ripped to digital. 3. Uploaded to YouTube and ran entire video through "auto-fix" using YouTube's tools. This helped with color and contrast. Here's the result here: https://archive.org/details/BlocksBoxMarbleAuction17Part11995March02 Let me know what you think can be improved in terms of color intensity and contrast. I can dial those in manually on YouTube and retry it and probably the same settings will work well with most of the tapes. I prefer putting them on archive.org because it's a non-commercial endeavor and you get options for downloading etc.

I will upload them and provide a link when I am done. My main concern right now is I didn't realize each tape was so long. First one is approaching 2 hours and I don't think my DVD recorder can hold much more than that, so if I have to stop and continue on a new disc it might be tricky patching them together into one file.

Just got Al's box. Am converting the first tape as I type. Tapes are definitely showing their age but still worth preserving, although I'm not sure I'm up to converting Bob's entire library.

My pleasure, thanks. When I'm finished if anyone has more that aren't in Al's lot, I will be happy to covert them to digital format if you'll pay shipping. I know there were more of them but I missed threads in the past where they were offered.

I have a Sony VHS to DVD converter. If nobody else has claimed these I will just to upload them to archive.org to be preserved for the collecting community.

Here's a few new ones (3/4"). The white-based ones are opalescent glass that really shines. Unsure of date except they are at least 30 years old.

I was thinking a fun way might be to make a button album where they are sewed onto suitable nice fabric backgrounds, perhaps attached by elastic so I can pull the buttons out a bit to examine them?

I don't know much about them aside from these being glass. The CAC-like striped one at the bottom, according to a German ETSY seller I bought more from, is from the 1950s. I've had a grand time browsing eBay for old buttons although aside from the intricate brass ones, glass is the only material that grabs me. I also have some of the rarer Japanese ceramic ones I inherited from my grandmother that I need to dig up. Have you seen the "charm string" glass ones that are basically 1/2" marbles? This one went for $13 and appears to be hand gathered(?). Quite a variety of these. How did you store your buttons?

I'm in a marble drought so I thought I'd try vintage glass buttons. Very pleased with the result and price per smile, although they are slightly out of round.

228

Here's some pontil examples from recently sold Bulgarian marbles. Glass is also very seedy.

Did the Bulgies facet their pontils? The ones I see have a very large rough pontil.

We call that a "cream of tomato soup" slag. Not really, but it looks like it should be called that.

I remember something like that and I coined the phrase "wall marbles" for any rare and exotic marbles you find in a wall but which mysteriously cannot be photographed.

Awesome Parrot that I am guessing will hit $80+.

Wow incredible find and what a great eye to spot it!

Can we see a shot of the pontil? I am asking more to learn since I am not an expert on these. The auction photo really does fool the eye on size!

What size? Where did you find it?

Fast enough to Buy it Now for $200. Anybody here win it?

Rainbow taffy mctwist.