marbles

how to make marbles

HOW TO PLAY MARBLES!
1 Draw a circle 2 to 3 feet wide. Use chalk on asphalt or concrete, a stick in dirt, or a string on carpet or tile.
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2 Select your shooter and place any marbles you wish to play with as targets inside the circle; the other players do the same. Shooters are designated marbles used to knock targets out of the ring. Your shooter should be larger than the other marbles so it's powerful enough to do its job. It should also look different from other marbles so you can distinguish it from them easily.
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3 Take your turn when the time comes by shooting your marble from outside the ring at any marble or marbles inside the ring. Shoot by kneeling on the ground and flicking your marble out of your fist with your thumb.
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4 Gather any marbles you've knocked out of the ring.
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5 Shoot again if you knocked any marbles out of the ring. Let the next player shoot if you haven't knocked any marbles out and/or your shooter remains in the ring.
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6 Continue shooting in turn until the ring is empty.
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7 Count your marbles at the end of the game. The winner is the player with the most marbles.
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8 Return the marbles to their original owners unless you're playing 'keepsies.' In that case, each player keeps the marbles he or she won during the game.

OTHER MARBLES GAMES


Marbles are often mentioned in Roman literature, and there are many examples of marbles from ancient Egypt. They were commonly made of clay, stone or glass and commonly referred to as a "Glass alley".
Ceramic marbles entered inexpensive mass production in the 1870s.
A German glassblower invented marble scissors in 1846, a device for making marbles.[1] The first mass produced toy marbles (clay) made in the US were made in Akron, Ohio by S.C Dyke in the early 1890s. The first US glass marbles were also made in Akron by James Harvey Leighton. In 1903, Martin Frederick Christensen of Akron, Ohio made the first machine made glass marbles on his patented machine. His company, The M.F. Christensen & Son Co. manufactured millions of toy and industrial glass marbles until they ceased operations in 1917. The next US company to enter the glass marble market was Akro Agate. This company was started by Akronites in 1911, but was located in Clarksburg West Virginia. Today, there are only two American based toy marble manufacturers: Jabo Vitro in Reno, Ohio and Marble King, in Paden City West Virginia.

One version of the game involves drawing a circle in sand, and players will take turns knocking other players' marbles out of the circle with their own marble. This game is called ringer. Other versions involve shooting marbles at target marbles or into holes in the ground (such as rolly or rolley hole). A larger-scale game of marbles might involve taking turns trying to hit an opponent's marble to win. A useful strategy is to throw a marble so that it lands in a protected, or difficult location if it should miss the target. As with many children's games, new rules are devised all the time, and each group is likely to have its own version, often customized to the environment. While the game of marbles was once ubiquitous and attracted widespread press to national tournaments, its popularity has dwindled in the television age.

Alley or real - made of marble or alabaster (alley is short for alabaster), streaked with wavy or other patterns with exotic names like corkscrew, spiral, snake, ribbon, onyx, swirl, bumblebee, butterfly, and...


An orange and white toothpaste marble
Toothpaste - wavy streaks usually with red, blue, black, white, orange
Turtle - wavy streaks containing green and yellow
Ade - strands of opaque white and color, making lemon-ade, lime-ade, orange-ade, etc.
Oxblood - a streaky patch resembling blood
Oilie or Oily - Opaque with a rainbow, iridescent finish
Pearls - Opaque with single color with "mother of pearl" finish
Lutz - a type of swirl, taken from the skating term
Onionskin - swirled and layered like an onion
Clambroth - equally spaced opaque lines on a usually opaque base
Cat's Eye or catseye - central eye-shaped colored inserts or cores (injected inside the marble)
Devil's Eye - red with yellow eye
Beachball - three colors and six vanes
Aggie - made of agate (aggie is short for agate) or glass resembling agate, with various patterns like in the alley
Bumblebee - mostly all yellow with two black strips on each side.
China - glazed porcelain, with various patterns like in the alley
Plaster - a form of china that is unglazed
Commie or common - made of clay
Bennington - clay fired in a kiln with salt glaze
Crock - made from crockery (earthenware) clay
Croton alley or Jasper - glazed and unglazed china marbled with blue
Crystal or clearie or purie - any clear colored glass - including "opals," "glimmers," "bloods," "rubies," etc. These can have any number of descriptive names such as "deep blue sea".
Princess - a tinted crystal
Galaxy - lots of dots inserted like a sky of stars
Indian - dark and opaque, usually black, with overlaid stripes of colors; usually white, and one or more other colors. Some new ones are also many colors like blue, green and scarlet.
Mica - glassy to translucent with streaks or patches of mica, ranging from clear to misty
Steely - made of steel; a true steely was made from a flat piece of steel folded into a sphere and shows a cross where the corners all come together. Without the cross, it's just a ball bearing.
Sulphide - Usually, a large (1.25 to 3 inch) clear glass sphere with an small statuette or figure inside. Most common are domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, cows, etc.; then wild animals; human figures are scarce; inanimate objects such as a train or pocket watch are very rare and command high prices. The interior figures are made of white clay or kaolin, and appear a silvery color due to light refraction. A sulphide in a colored-glass sphere, or with a painted figure inside, is also very rare and brings a high price. WARNING = Like other types of antique marbles, sulphides have been reproduced and faked in large quantities.
Tiger- Clear with orange/ yellow stripes

Marble collecting is a hobby practiced by over 400 million people around the world. Marbles are categorized by many factors including condition, size, type, manufacturer/artisan, age, style, materials, scarcity, and the existence of original packaging (which is further rated in terms of condition). A marble's worth is primarily determined by type, size, condition and eye-appeal, coupled with the law of supply and demand. Ugly, but rare marbles may be valued as much as those of very fine quality. However, this is the exception, rather than the rule - "Condition is King" when it comes to marbles. Any surface damage (characterized by missing glass, such as chips or pits) typically cut book value by 50% or more.
Due to the large market, there are many related side businesses that have sprung up such as numerous books and guides, web sites dedicated to live auctions of marbles only, and collector conventions. Additionally, many glass artisans produce marbles for the collectors' market only, with some selling for hundreds of dollars

Marbles are made using many techniques. They can be categorized into two general types: hand-made and machine-made.
Marbles were originally made by hand. Stone or ivory marbles can be fashioned by grinding. Clay, pottery, ceramic, or porcelain marbles can be made by rolling the material into a ball, and then letting dry, or firing, and then can be left natural, painted, or glazed. Clay marbles, also known as crock marbles or commies (common), are made of slightly porous clay, traditionally from local clay or leftover earthenware ('crockery'), rolled into balls, then glazed and fired at low heat, creating an opaque imperfect sphere that is frequently sold as the poor boy's 'old timey' marble. Glass marbles can be fashioned through the production of glass rods which are stacked together to form the desired pattern, cutting the rod into marble-sized pieces using marble scissors, and rounding the still-malleable glass.
One mechanical technique is dropping globules of molten glass into a groove made by two interlocking parallel screws. As the screws rotate, the marble travels along them, gradually being shaped into a sphere as it cools. Color is added to the main batch glass and/or to additional glass streams that are combined with the main stream in a variety of ways. For example, in the "cat's-eye" style, colored glass vanes are injected into a transparent main stream. Applying more expensive colored glass to the surface of cheaper transparent or white glass is also a common technique.