Marbles, Marbles, Everywhere

I got bit by the marble bug last year. I really am intrigued by these little, and not so little, spheres. I didn't really like playing with marbles as a kid - never saw the fun it it. I know that will cause issues with some serious marble collectors though. I find the very small "play" marbles to be throw-away stuff. Most are made overseas now anyway. But some people seriously collect them. There is another faction that collects larger, hand-made marbles. These are considered art. Most are in the 2" to 3" diameter size range. This is what I learned to make. I make these in the furnace rather than in torch flame. This is the basic difference in "off-hand" glassblowing versus flameworking.
I've made about 250 now. Here is a picture of one I made that I quite like. It's a little over 2" in diameter. I haven't weighed it, but I think it would be around one pound. Photographing marbles is hard. You need to get a good close up and the lighting tends to cause reflections everywhere. This could be touched up in Photoshop but I haven't bothered on these type of reference pictures.

This piece is a black core with the swirls of color in white, yellow, red, and a sparkly special glass called dichroic.

Not shown in the picture is the north pole of the marble. This one has all the colors swirling together to a single point - similar to a vortex. The south pole doesn't swirl, the colors do meet at the pole but without the vortex. All in all a very nice marble.

Grinding Marbles into Submission

I make hand-blown glass marbles, which I've blogged a little bit about previously. I'm pretty good at it, but in order to be GREAT, you have to make quite a few. Unfortunately, I don't have the energy or time to practice enough to be great, so I'll settle for good enough. Sometimes I make a marble that is great in it's color, pattern, or something that says this one could have been great, but it isn't quite round or has some "skudge" on the surface. That's where cold working the marble comes into play.

A marble, to be great in my mind, not only has to have a great interior, but also be perfectly spherical. A marble is just a fancy name for glass sphere! I priced out sphere polishing machines that are normally used in lapidary (stone and gem) working. $2000 and up just isn't in my price range. Therefore I do what I usually do, figure that I can make one myself. How hard could it be? A few hours on the net and I saw that others had done similar things. I took the best of what I found, thought about it, and then proceeded to design my own. The video below shows the results.



I was absolutely astonished that it works. I really was a disbeliever in myself. This is less than $50 in parts. The only thing I bought were surplus gear motors at $7 each. The rest of the stuff I had around the workshop. I had the hinges, some extra T-Track, and the on/off switch. I've purchased a collection of pipe fittings and couplers from the big box hardware aisle. There is a whole story that can (and will) be written about what I've learned. The grit feed is absolutely genius. I didn't invent it, but think I've taken a couple of things I saw and incorporated it into a better approach. The grit is suspended in anti-freeze rather than water. This does two things, first it makes the solution more viscous and the grit doesn't come out of solution and sink to the bottom of the cup. Second, water would make parts rust, not good.

I've done a lot of testing, and the results are spectacular. The first marble I did was an early clear sphere that clearly wasn't a sphere. It was pretty squished. Ten minutes at 80 grit and the thing was perfectly round. Un-freaking-believable. It's pretty messy, but cold working glass usually is.

Someday I'll take a series of before, during, after pictures to post. If I could only remember to do it.

More Glowing in the Dark

I just returned from the workshop at The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass. Refer to the post on "the class" below. I'll post more on that topic later. One of the side benefits of taking workshops at Corning is their wonderful photo studio. You can sign up for a one hour photo session with a very experienced glass photographer. If you've ever tried to photograph glass objects, you know its pretty hard. Glass is typically so shiny that there are reflections galore, hot spots, and other problems.

The photographer, Amy, is wonderful and can make your work beautiful. I threw her a real problem. I made some marbles that glow in the dark. Marbles are hard enough to photograph to begin with. They are smallish, round, shiny, and reflect distortions of everything. Then adding the "glow in the dark" part on top of it makes it more than I can do in my tabletop photo tent.

Here is a composite that we made - a "day and night" view. This really shows what can be done by a talented photographer.

Glowing in the Dark

Objects that glow in the dark have always fascinated me. There are some mysterious and magical qualities in the chemical and physical properties going on. For those of us who live in the 21st century where everything plugs in or runs on batteries, we expect to have to turn on a switch to have something light up.

During one of my courses at Corning, the instructor, James Nowak, made an off-hand comment about glow in the dark glass. We pressed for details and were treated to a wonderful demo. Sure enough, once the demo piece was complete and annealed, we took it out in the sunlight for a minute or two. Upon moving back inside, even though it was lighted and not really dark, it was clear that the piece was glowing a deep green color! Fantastic! Cool! And whatever other adjectives apply to this amazing idea.



This is actually a little harder than it sounds. First, you need some special "glow in the dark" power. This can be obtained from Glow, Inc. I got the Ultra Green v10 Glow in the Dark Powder and the Ultra Blue Glow in the Dark Powder. Based on the rating system on the website, the "Ultra Green V10" is the brightest and longest lasting. The "Ultra Blue Glow" is the next brightest. The rest seemed pretty weak in comparison.

Most people would expect to just roll the hot glass in the powder to coat the glass. That doesn't work. The glow powder doesn't melt, even at the hot glass temperatures of over 2000 degrees Farenheit. It just rolls right off. Pretty tough stuff. The solution we used is to create a little cup, put a teaspoon or two of the powder in the cup, and seal the cup with hot glass. This takes two people to do effectively. In order to spread the glow uniformly throughout a blown glass object, you need to gather over the cup a few times to get the mass of glass you want to use. Then repeated stretching, folding, twisting, and bending are needed to distribute the powder. Since the powder is melted, you are attempting to encapsulate a few grains of powder into little pockets all through the piece.

The picture above was taken indoors in a completely dark room and a photoflood spotlight used to "charge" the vase for about 10 minutes. The piece can be charged in sunlight, even an overcast day, in a few seconds, but a bright light takes a lot longer. My windows get bright sunlight but the glass panes must block out a lot of the UV spectrum as that is what is required to excite the glow powder. I need to create a simple base with a small UV black light as that works well to charge the glow particles.

Here is a picture of the vase in normal light. The glow glass is the base color and then coated in black. The black was sandblasted away to expose the glow layer.

I've made some great marbles with this technique, however I haven't got any pictures to post. See the "1000 Objects - More or Less" post for the reasons behind that sorry tale.

Losing My Marbles

I'm fascinated by how easily "non-techie" types can create and post videos on YouTube. They make it sound so easy. Thus was born a goal to create and post my very own video and become famous on YouTube. Now, I'm a fairly techie type. I know computers, I know cameras, I know video editing and producing. After all, I was the "Producer of the Year" back in 1996 at our local cable broadcast station. I produced, directed, or otherwise assisted in creating about 100 hours of live programs that year. So I figured it would be a no-brainer for me.

First up, I had the computer and the software, but I needed a digital camera. When I buy something, I want the best - but spending a $1000 on a new HD camera just for a whim didn't make much sense. And settling for something less wouldn't make me happy. Then I remembered, we gave our daughter and son-in-law a digital camera for Christmas about three years ago. I had a plan. I'd borrow the camera and all would be just dandy.

Camera in hand, I started playing with it. That is when the first issue occurred. Even though it was an auto-focus camera, everything seemed blurry except a certain zoom setting. Hmm. So I do what I never do, read the frickin' manual (RTFM)! That didn't help. It said the auto-focus should actually focus on the subject. After about two hours of futzing, I came to the realization that the focusing mechanism didn't work any more. A call to my daughter confirmed my suspicion. Oh well, I have a massive tripod from my photography days. I'll just set it up and keep the camera locked in one position. Not the best, but it would work.

Now I decided I wanted to make a short video about my marbles. I really hadn't taken any photographs of them - see previous posting on that long, sorid tale. I filmed (oops I can't say filmed, or even taped any more as these are obsolete technologies, guess its "videoed") about 15 minutes of stuff. I even tried some movement trying to keep the focus in check. All those years of handholding a camera paid off as I think I had usable footage.

Next hurdle was moving the video from the camera to the computer. Did I mention that this camera is "only" three years old? Again, I was faced with obsolescence. It uses a small re-recordable DVD to store the video. I had to download drivers for the computer to actually read that disk. Another hour wasted - but had the files onto my computer.

And then the next hurdle - I have to convert the file to a recognized format. Back to the 'net to find a suitable converter. Oh crap, all of them cost $. Look for another hour before I find one that works, doesn't have a watermark, and is free, at least for the time being. Looks like this Saturday is getting taken up on this adventure.

The file is now recognized by the sofware I plan to use - Camtasia. Maybe not the best, but I own it, I know it, and it should do the job. This turns out to be the easiest step by far. Drag a few clips, edit them down, find a suitable royaltee-free piece of muzak on the web, create some titles, and transitions, blah blah blah. This is where all that TV production experience comes into play. Piece of cake. Gee, I can have some fun doing this.

I log on to YouTube, create an ID, upload the file, and I have a VIDEO ON YOUTUBE!!! Eight or nine hours later, but I've done it. I didn't spend any money in the process either. Nor did I have any trips to the big box stores (Lowes, Home Depot, Meijer, ...) which is my usual Saturday morning conversation - "I'm off to Lowes".