Kevin

I know some marble collectors don't bother with cats eyes but I quite like them, I'm always on the look out for vintage cat eyes but I only buy them if the price is right and that there is a good amount of them. I've bought a few more lots of them I've got around 300 of vintage cats eyes so far plus I get the odd few vintage onion skin marbles in with the cats eye marbles too which is always nice to find. I do collect other types but I'm fairly new to marble collecting and going for vintage cats eyes is a good way to kick start my vintage marble collection. I'll upload some photos later if anybody is interested is seeing what I have.

It turns out that the marbles I got from the charity shop which I thought were 80s to 90s are in fact much more older, I can't say the same about all of them that I got in the bag but most are much older and many are hand made rather than machine made which I failed to notice at first. I did pretty good with those. I'll be keeping a sharp look out for anymore in those charity shops. Its amazing what things can show up in charity shops.

Some nice marbles there. Did you dig those dirty marbles lol? I see you have some nice codd bottles, that dark codd looks rare.

I've learned a lot already, I learn pretty quickly I have a lot of marbles and I also have a lot of experience with general antiques... Its would seem like a lot of the cats eye marbles are generally worthless, however I don't collect because of what something maybe worth. I do like cats eye marbles and I think its good to have some in my collection so that I have a good variety of marbles. A lot of modern cat eye marbles and some milky marbles I can tell there modern as there are a lot of them and they will pretty much all look the same. The vintage cats eye marbles have a distinct look about them meaning they could be 80s or 90s and some others could be older they are the ones I like as I remember those as a child. I've been searching ebay and I've got myself a few good lots of marbles and I bought a couple modern big 22mm marbles and some other 16mm modern marbles just because I liked the look of them. I'm going to try keep my attentions to vintage marbles for my next marble hunt. Hopefully I'll be able to get some onion skin marbles and some other handmade Victorian marbles to add to my growing collection.

So I know with some marbles they can be hard to tell if they are old or modern marbles, or at least for me anyway because I don't know a lot about marbles I just collect them. I know what some old Victorian marbles look like but other than that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a modern cats eye marble from an old cats eye marble. I also collect musket balls that I find when out and about which go into my marble collection. The only way I can tell the difference between an old marble from a new marble is from condition or how decorative it is, like with modern marbles you'd get a lot that are the same but with older ones you get more of a variety of colors and design. How would you tell an old marble from a modern marble?

Your right, modern marbles are getting older but there's nothing quite like a collection of Vintage marbles from the 70's and 80's I grew up in the 90's and there were a lot of 70's and 80's marbles about I remember kids trading them when I was at school and marble games in the playground. I can't really feel much of a connection with modern marbles. I will get my ideal collection very soon, I've already got some 90's marbles to kick start my collection.

I've just joined, and I decided to dig out my old marbles... well there not very old there about 13 years old so nothing special but better than some of the modern cats eye/milky marbles that are made today. Ideally I'd like to collect old marbles from the 70's and 80's and some Victorian marbles too and clay marbles but they are so expensive, plus I have noticed a lot of ebay sellers are passing off modern marbles as "vintage" marbles. I searched a few charity shops and found a few bags of marbles which look early 90's and they are all different so I was quiet chuffed with that. I do also have thousands of modern marbles that I bought in a moment of madness because I wanted a large collection of them but its not a good collection when a lot of the modern marbles all look the same, they were cheap and I bought 20 bags of them each bag contained 100 marbles so I have a lot of them. I'm hoping to build up a decent collection tho rather than quantity.