Shamrock Marbles

First four flames I made back in 2004…

Thank you for the follow up videos. Many more questions…

@Royal3 Looks like more updated information has been shared. The next video has additional info.

Alan, I agree with you. It wasn’t like they had a better show wanting that time slot. Our first visit to the show was most confusing. It cost us more to attend the show and events as a guest than attending as a dealer. The next year and subsequent years we returned as dealers and it was cheaper! Heck, we even sold marbles! Wheaton did everything to thwart visitors from attending. Poor attendance resulted in poor sales. My wife and I are fully employed engineers. We didn’t need the marble sales income. Whereas, the full time artists needed to recover expenses. Some traveled from California! It broke our hearts hearing the grumbling. Wheaton managed the program into a death spiral. Shame. I cherish the memories and friendships. Do you remember Harry making his sonar sound into the microphone during his demonstration? “Boop, boop, boop, boop”? He also talked about encasing the cobalt glass in the crystal and was worried about contamination of the clear.

Wheaton is still pretty much the same 20 years later…

Pictures from Brian Bowden:

…someone who posts here took this picture of Harry Besett demonstrating at Wheaton Village. I’m hiding behind Drew Fritts in the front row. Those Wheaton shows were the best!

Here is a neat YouTube video: Enjoy your journey!! -John

From AAM.

Tommy, I just love these style of slags. They remind me of the surface of Europa.

Construction = 5⭐️ Color Combo = 5⭐️ Imagine being there that marble was created! The things we’d learn!!

Stunning!! Don’t get me wrong, but this reminds me of purulent discharge from an abscess. I would be extremely happy to have this specimen in my collection. I’m jelly. -John

“Over the top” is an understatement.

Happy Birthday! If you are like me, we have fewer ahead of us than behind us. Enjoy each day. Daily, tell those closest that that you love them. Life is short. Memento mori.

WTF? What would you call that? Stunning marble!

Wishing you luck!! Would love to have been there when they discovered the blue burned out or the black faded to gray/grey! The conversation would have been priceless. As much as people would like to think glass chemistry is a science, it is mostly a theory and art.

Okay, if you sell it, do you have to claim “slight pocket wear” or “dryer polished”?

There are more than just similarities. The marbles are the same but with different glass combinations. The difference between a swirl and a flame is the way the glass stream piles upon itself. Swirl = Random. Flame = Coil. Enjoy the journey!!

Fixed your photo. 😉

Some can “see” the geometry, but others may need an illustration. Glad you have the capacity to create in the mind’s eye.

It is one of those things that need a diagram.

In the Fall of 2003, I publicly demonstrated the “Genesis” machine at Moon Marble in Bonner Springs, KS. Most people wanted to buy the marble that they saw me make during the demonstration. It wasn’t until the Spring of 2004 that Les Jones looked at my marbles and the “Junk” that people started buying my 50-cent creations. Les saw similar features in my rudimentary marbles that caused him to question me. (That is a whole different story!)

Not exactly. It is a function of the Blade Thickness and Bevel Angle. Trigonometry.

Let me set the stage… I’ve demonstrated the marble machines since 2003/2006. I’ve let people make marbles at those events. Craig stepped up on the smaller machine (“Genesis”). It is a completely different mindset versus using a graphite marble mold that he was familiar with. I told Craig he had to get the glass molten so he could cut it off the punty. He got it so hot that it extruded off the punty. By the time he cut it, it was about 1.5” long. It landed on the rollers and formed a “Loop”! We were all flabbergasted!! That loop danced on the rollers. I knocked it off and put it in the kiln for annealing. I used to sell the “screw ups” for 50-cents, then later 1-dollar. Those anomalies made people very happy.

I get the same “fingerprint” when I cut with my Fiskars. One could actually measure that distance and determine the thickness of the shear blade.