bumblebee

You can go to https://app.wombo.art/ and type a prompt and then select a style. The AI engine will then generate the piece for you. (Sometimes it glitches and you have to start over.) Here are some of my prompts. "Playing Marbles with God" "Stephanie researching marbles with her cat" "Middle age men trading marbles in a hotel" "Ron sitting on a pile of dug toy marbles in West Virginia" (Don't feel bad, Ron, this is abstract art!) "Finding a super rare toy marble in the wild" (This might be my favorite)

Glad to hear you're back on the mend!

Nice mineral spheres! I have been tempted to collect more mineral spheres but I am rather hooked on the German handmade agate marbles. Just got this 1.06" hand-faceted one today, which is about the largest size I have found for German agates. I have seen someone who has some 2" ones that are hand-ground but I suspect they were made as advertising displays:

Seller in Mexico showed me this bag of clay marbles he said was from the 1950s/1960s from a defunct company. He confirmed they are clay by busting one open. He was asking about $140 for them so I passed but @Al Oregon said he had not seen this bag before, so I thought it worth posting for the sake of history.

And the winner is.... THE BOTTOM MARBLE is a Bulgarian handmade. 42% (6 votes) chose that marble which is very impressive to me. The top and middle marbles got 28% (4 guesses each). In hand, the only dead giveaway to my eyes was the color on the Bulgarian. Even the pontil was close enough to the Navarre to fool the eye without a loupe. Under magnification, however, the Bulgarian pontil is rough across the surface like fine sandpaper, common to all the Bulgarian marbles. Now I just need a couple of Leightons to do this again....😉

Hah! Creative guessing but they're all shades of purple.

Pretty sure these are also Guacamayas in a 1990s net bag.

That's too bad! 5/8" would have been ideal but I assume they're not trying to cater to our very small community. But imagine you could have all Pelt Rainbos, Vitro Easter Eggs, etc.

I made them grayscale to make this more challenging. I will post the answer and the color version on Sunday evening.

Maybe the YouTube will work:

Definitely a fun truly vintage group to sort through with some interesting looking ones.

Unclear to me whether you can use your own game marbles on it. That seems a must-have feature to me.

Scored some Reverse Blackies in an estate sale jar today. $25 for the jar. Not shown are a bunch more common mibs including a couple of nice Akro corks and the usual beat-up slags and a few rusty steelies.

Looks like Czech bullet molds to me. What size are they?

True yours look more classic but I just got lucky on this one. Very hard to find these so I've not seen many.

Yes they look like large Tri-Lites. They can get pretty wonky and glorious at that size. Check mine out:

Nice! Seems like marbles are becoming a better investment these days. Cedarman just sold a Vitro Wedding cake for $178.

Here's two Gucamaya bag images I found recently. The marbles in here look like later run Vacors often do, more chalky and cheaper.

I confess I bought marbles like that on eBay hoping they were MFCs but I only paid about $12. They were definitely not MFCs.

Wow! Makes me wonder how may fires were started with discarded clearies?

I figured I had to post something for April Fool's Day!

This is why I think @Da Roberto may be right about CAC on this one. Vivid colors, out of round, and a super unusual size. Hot dog! I scored again...

Pretty sure on this identification. It's very wet mint.

That makes me hiccup! Seriously, if you're going to have bubbles, go full tilt like that.

It took this article to inspire me to bang two handmade agates together in the dark. I was quite delighted by the repeatable results: an orange spark. Apparently on the massive red sandstone grinding wheels of Idar-Oberstein, due to the intense speed and friction, this sparking becomes something of a fireworks show as the agates "become throughout splendidly luminous with red light and at the same time transparent." 1874-The-Philosophical-Magazine-Light-In-The-Grinding-Stones.pdf