Chordus

Your marble a splode.

They make ok mibs, but horrible shooters.

Slag marbles in a slag glass bowl? Brilliant!

Wow, that is an awesome catch for thirty bucks!

The polymer was for what, just a repair? Making the marble look a little better? If that's the case, I actually like the repair. It's a nice way of saying "I want to make this marble look better, but I also want it to be obvious that it's been altered." Of course, that only works if you tell people what you've done.

It's not how long you've had your collection that matters. It's how quickly you sort any marbles that you get. I usually buy jars at antique shops, but put off the actual sorting bit. Sooner or later, it reaches critical mass, and becomes much harder than placing individual marbles where they belong. That Timex Cabinet looks like it'd be awesome for marbles! I must make a note to get one for myself in the future.

Let me give you some advice that I learned this summer, bigjohn: The longer you wait to organize your marbles, the worse it becomes when you do. All I had was two shelves full of unorganized marbles, and it took three weeks to get them dealt with.

Ok, here's a picture of the table. Not easy to find, but not too difficult either. These look really, really good, I promise. I've also made a few stands like what follows. They're real easy to make– take a cheap piece of wood, drill some large holes in it, and then cover it with felt. The felt hasn't been attached to this one fully, so it doesn't look perfect, but it gives you the basic idea. The felt bends so that the marbles are held well, and you can use any cheap piece of scrap wood, without stains or anything. Nice and cheap. Note: Do NOT move stands like this with the marbles in them. It works fine horizontally, but the marbles roll out real easy.

There are some table-style cases you can get; they don't hold many since there's only one layer, but they look great! I'll get a picture later... Also, gun cases. If you plan on keeping marbles in one place and never moving them, then display cases are all well and good. But if you have marbles that you want to move around sometimes (which I find that I do, though others don't), gun cases are the way to go. Not the most beautiful in the world, but very efficient and keeps the marbles extra-safe. And when they're not traveling, just prop them open wherever you display the others! For extra kicks, go with a rifle case. They're impossible to haul around, but it's totally worth the reaction when you open this enormous case full of marbles.

And here are a few marbles taken under a darker light. I was hoping that it'd help make the pictures less contrasty, and I was successful, but now the pictures are too dark. The best examples of what the color looks like is here, though. The best approximation of the color is the first one posted, and the second is a good approximation of the lighter cyan glass. I'm sure you all have cyan slags of your own; they're rarer, but they're not that unheard of; no rarer than red and lemonade slags. So on that note, I'm not going to go out of my way to make the pictures any better for now.

I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get the best lighting on these marbles, basically to no avail. My camera simply doesn't like this color. I'm posting a few of the pics though, just so that people can get a very basic idea of what I mean when I say "cyan slag." Here's what I would consider the spectrum, the darkest on the left and the lightest on the right. Since the photo is kinda not so great, they all look more similar in the photo than in real life. Here are six of my best cyan slags, all of whom are the same shade (which is the most common in my experiance). And here are some individual pictures, some of which actually match up pretty closely to the real color. *Some of these are the same marble from different angles. I didn't make exact notes as to which are which.

I've never been on a dig. Anybody got any future digs near MD that I can ride along on?

Leave the conspiracies to me, lostmymibs. I'm a professional. This is how they're doing it. It turns out that the companies who used uranium glass all stuck nano-radio-transmitter in them at the time of their production. They then filed information on every single one of these marbles, which is now held deep under a mountain in West Virginia. When somebody posts a picture of one of these marbles, they go through the files and find that exact marble. They then locate that marble using the transmitter– whose range is amplified by the uranium. Using Google Maps (which was secretly funded by this company), they find our exact address, and mail the catalog out. Since most of us have posted out names at some point or another, that part's easy. Their ultimate goal is to get us to buy marbles made of crystal, which they have build to resonate hypnotic subliminal messages to us.

I can understand if some of you want one, but I would like to point out that this is a pretty significant security breach if addresses were gotten through this site. Given that many people here are members of other marble sites, though, the breach may not have actually happened here.

I don't have his info myself, but I know somebody who does. Contact jackandsue AT themarbleman DOT com ; they're both good friends with Sammy, and should be able to hook you up. edit by Steph: I changed the @ to AT and the . to DOT to try to avoid web crawlers getting their email adress.

It sounds like I'm the only cyan collector out there. So here's my definition. The top half is the spectrum from green to blue (cyan is, by definition, in the center). The bottom half is the area of the spectrum that I'd call cyan in marbles. I'll post pictures of the actual marbles when I can.

Leighton's... that'd be something you don't see every day. Didn't even cross my mind; I've only seen them in books. Those tend to have pontils though, don't they?

I'm no expert, so you may want to wait and hear what others say. It would not be the first time I've been wrong on this board.

Those are absolutely gorgeous! *wants* I'm fairly certain that those are CAC. The lighter blue colors I've seen once or twice in CAC. The redness in the one slag is also indicative of Christensen as well, though I've never seen it mixed in with blue like that.

Yes

Alan's got a few towards the center of his picture, and there's one in the top row of Dan's. I think a lot of collectors call it light blue, sometimes aqua. I work a lot with colors, though, so I can say with absolute confidence that the glass is actually cyan. Yup. I can never get a good picture of cyan slags. I have some excellent ones, but no matter how hard I try, they always end up as just a blue smudge. I have some cyan swirls of completely unknown origin that I'd like to have IDed too, but I just can't catch any. I planned on grabbing some pics of my slags, what with them being the pride of my collection (I have low standards), but I had to leave home earlier than expected today, and won't be back in a week. Such is life. Just hang in there, though; when I get back, I will astound you all with my amazing collection of cyan smudges! And Jeepers, that cup is amazing. I want it too. Maybe Nancy and I could play a game of marbles for it?

Oh yah, cyan slag prices are gonna go through the roof. My buying habits are really going to shrink the pool. *Pulls $12.63 out of his wallet* How many will this get me? Mint condition only.

My goal in life is to buy every single cyan slag in the world.

I take a certain amount of pride in my collection, but pictures of the collections from those on this board are always a good reality check of exactly where I belong. Some of these seem too good to be real! Here's one that I left out from my first post. Dunno where the other angle is, but you're not missing much on the other side.

You're steal'n my thunder, man! Guess I missed my opportunity... *Finds a corner to sulk in* The slags that Jeepers posted are all higher-end slags; I see a lot of handgathered slags here, and colors that are on the rarer end of the spectrum. Here's a quick verbal rundown of the more common types; if nobody covers these colors by tomorrow morning, I'm gonna haul out my box and get some examples: Dark blue and dark green are the most common in my experience. Brown and purple are the next most common; jeeper's posted two excellent examples of brown in the upper left, but no purples. Red and cyan are where the slags start becoming uncommon; this glass also seems to chip easier, so finding them in good condition is that much harder. The lemonade slags are generally the rarest of the normal colors, and I find that they tend to be a little flimsier as well. Jeepers, that slag on the far left, second down– that's pelt, right? Absolutely stunning!