Here at House of Marbles, during our typical day-to-day jobs, wherever we work (be that the restaurant, warehouse, shop, or office), at some point, a member of staff will be asked a question about how marbles are made. In fact, it is one of the things we get asked about most, and for obvious reasons!
What is most fascinating about the process of marble making is the way in which it is so unique compared to almost any other product that might ever be produced. Glass is an excellent substance to work with and can be manipulated into virtually any shape, size, or finish.
It is also a fragile material in many ways, and so when you think about it, making a marble out of something that can break so easily seems like an odd choice for an item that is intended to be rolled on the ground, knocked against other pieces of glass, and generally used and abused.
Glass is also a material that requires high-temperature processing, which seems counterproductive for a product sold for as little as a few pence. To understand why this material is used is therefore really important.
The evolution of marbles
Let me take you back in time to ancient Rome, where it is known that marble-like games were played with nuts. Picture those toga-wearing ancestors, happily rolling their walnuts or hazelnuts in a competitive and jovial spirit, as a way to pass the time between the gladiator games and Olympic sports that we know were popular at that time.
Why are marbles not an Olympic sport today, you ask? It could very well be because of the short shelf life of nuts – how disappointing to discover your favourite ‘shooter’ only for it to have gone off by the time you reach the finals!
After nuts, we know that clay was used to produce marbles – it was easy to mould and create in a range of sizes or colours, but sadly not that resistant to constant use. Over time, these clay marbles would erode and become misshapen. Not so great for rolling.
Next up was the stone marble, made from marble, quartz or semi-precious materials. Of course, crafting stone into a round shape is not that easy and requires some skill. Years ago, there would have been more people who worked with stone by trade, and perhaps they were more readily available.
These days, you can still get stone marbles, and they are very pretty – generally used in decorative displays for the home, perhaps on the coffee table. You can still use stone marbles for their intended purpose, and of course, use may lead to some damage, but ultimately, for a small child’s toy, they are more expensive to make.
Then came the glass marble – created by glassmakers who, at the end of the day, would gather up any leftover glass and shape it into a ball to take home for their children. These marbles were unsurprisingly referred to as ‘end of day’ marbles and (although made from scraps and offcuts essentially) are highly collectable today.
We have some on display here in our Marble Museum in Devon as an example of the origins of marbles.
Glass, of course, can still break and become damaged with use; however, it can be used to produce a wide variety of designs that are both visually pleasing and practical. The thickness of the glass means that while they can still be broken, they can also bear the brunt of the force of a regular game of marbles and live to tell the tale (bye-bye nuts).
Machine-made marbles – rolled in a machine!
Glass marbles are no longer made in the way the ‘end of day’ marbles would have been made, but can be produced relatively cheaply by pouring molten glass into a marble-making machine that rolls the glass until it is cooled, with the end product being – you guessed it, glass marbles. This does have its limitations, though and cannot for example:
- Make individual marbles to an exact size – there is a specific size that we aim for, and the ‘tolerance’ for size variation will typically vary by about 1mm on either side of the intended size. Sometimes, the marbles produced will be either over or under the desired threshold, making them unsuitable for use.
- Make all marbles exactly the same size as each other – this is the same principle as the above. While marbles within the same batch will typically be more similar in size to one another, some variation is inevitable.
Another thing that people tend not to realise is that colour is something that can vary widely, and this is the case in all types of glass production (not just marbles).
The addition of coloured sand colours glass, and while there are many shades of this available, how it comes out in production is VERY changeable depending on the atmosphere the day the item is produced.
This includes factors such as air humidity and temperature, among others. Red glass is a particularly changeable colour that can be bright orange on one day or dark maroon on another (when everything else in the equation remains the same).
This is why it is often more expensive to buy red glass, AND the reason you may see less pink and purple glass around than other colours, because red is an essential element.
Among other things, we are asked if marbles can be made with particular colours, such as brand colours or Pantone colours, and unfortunately, this is just not possible.
Another issue with creating marbles for specific purposes is often the expectation of cost and quantity. To be able to obtain and sell machine-made marbles at a very reasonable price (from just 5p, depending on size), we need to produce high quantities of each style.
Not many businesses have the capacity to do this, but as we are House of Marbles, we have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of marbles in stock at any one time, enabling us to sell them to our trade and retail customers worldwide at the great prices we do.
Collectors Marbles – made in a glassworks studio.
Should you really need to have marbles made to order, and the budget is available, then marbles can be produced by hand, and this is something that our glassworks, Teign Valley Glass, are capable of doing. In these instances, it may not be possible to produce EVERY pattern that people might be able to think of because you are working with molten glass.
In the glassworks studio here in Devon, they make several items. They produce marbles less frequently, but still with the same attention to detail as their other art glass pieces. Marbles produced in the glassworks here would typically be available to purchase for around £40-£60 per marble, so this is by no means a price that most people would associate with marbles.
This is a type of marble that we refer to as a Collector’s Marble or Collectable Marble because they are rarely used to actually play marbles with (except for the odd game of Marble Solitaire, perhaps, on a special board).
It is more of a display piece to cherish and appreciate, in the same way as other glass items, such as paperweights. As with machine-made marbles, again it is often challenging to make marbles to an exact size, and the same variation will apply to the colours used in the process.
Teign Valley Glass works primarily with clear glass, adding colour to the product as they go, which can differ from the methods other glasswork studios use.
There is a massive market for Collectors Marbles, especially in the USA, and some of the designs being produced by today’s top makers are simply stunning by anyone’s standards.
Due to the extensive work involved in creating these designs, marbles can cost up to £1000 or more. The most expensive marble that House of Marbles has ever had for sale was £800! We do have some great Collectors Marbles available from as little as £4.99, so don’t let it be said that collecting marbles is out of most people’s budgets.
Handmade Marbles – made using the lampworking method of glassmaking
There is also a 3rd option in the array of glassmaking methods that falls between the high-end Collectors’ Marbles and the tiny budget of the machine-made marble range.
We refer to these as our handmade marbles. Handmade marbles are crafted using a process known as lampworking. The process is very much as it sounds – a person sitting in front of a small flame (a Bunsen burner type lamp, which you may remember from science class in school), working with rods of glass.
The rods of various colours are melted and moulded, with small parts added to create multiple shapes and designs.
Using this method, there are more design options available than with machine-made marbles (which are essentially different colour variations of rolled glass), but fewer options than with Collectors Marbles.
This is because typically Collectors Marbles are larger, allowing more room to create desired designs. However, we are constantly surprised by the fantastic designs that we can produce.
From floral designs to picture marbles and, more recently, glow-in-the-dark marbles (a relatively modern invention in the glass-making world), we offer a wide array of designs, colours, and finishes that many of our customers enjoy collecting and displaying.
Maker’s Marks on marbles
As with Collector’s marbles, Handmade marbles have to be held to be worked on. They are usually attached to a glass rod that is broken off when the design is complete. This rod ‘stump’ is then smoothed over with heat so that hopefully you will not see where the holding point was at all.
However, on closer inspection, you may often see signs that point to this, and many Handmade marbles will retain a maker’s mark.
You will still see maker’s marks on machine-made marbles, but these appear in a different form, because they are made using a different method. Typically, the larger the marble the more noticeable those ‘maker’s marks’ will be.
We refer to these as ‘roll marks’ on machine-made marbles, because where the molten glass is rolled until it cools, the glass on the outside of the marble cools more quickly than the inside. With larger marbles, the outer glass cools as the marbles are still forming, and so roll marks are more obvious.
Roll marks are more visible on some designs than others and can be perceived by some customers as a ‘product issue’, whereas they are simply evidence of how a marble was made.
For this reason, we strive to provide actual pictures of our designs on our retail website in larger sizes, allowing you to see the difference between a small and a large marble. Any marble can look significantly different when it is a Peewee size (10–12mm) at the smallest end of the scale, compared to when it is our largest Enormous size (50mm).
It is worth noting that makers’ marks can also appear intentionally, as is often seen in collectors’ marbles, where the maker’s mark is either engraved into the marble or added to the base with a drawing in platinum.
Marble finishes
Of course, there are also a wide variety of finishes that can be applied to various marbles (made by any method), and these are the main ones that people tend to be most interested in:
- Opaque vs. clear – Glass, whether colourless or coloured, can either allow light through (clear/transparent) or not (opaque/solid), and variations of this can create many different effects.
- Many Collectors and Handmade Marbles are covered in a transparent layer of colourless glass, which smooths over any design work and creates the desired finish and shape.
- The larger the marble, the less the ‘transparent’ or ‘clear’ glass will allow you to see through it. Although it should still allow light through it will allow less light through than a smaller, less dense marble.
- Frosted finish marbles – any glass can be ‘frosted’ when it has been made. This can be accomplished by either sandblasting the glass to remove the smooth finish, or it can be achieved through a chemical process. You will be able to picture what a ‘frosted’ finish looks and feels like when you think of sea glass, as this is a naturally occurring form of the frosting process.
- Lustrous finish marbles – this is a coating added to a marble after it has been made, which creates an opalescent or iridescent finish. It is not a coloured finish, but transparent, although it tends to glisten with rainbow colours, much like the surface of a puddle of oil.
- Textured finish marbles – some marbles are rolled in small grains of glass (or splattered with paint) that can add a different colour to the outside. This can sometimes mean that the marble is not as round or smooth as people expect, and this process is typically used in machine-made marble production.
Marble sizes
Marbles tend to come in a variety of sizes: What you might call those sizes, though, will depend on the country and region where you grew up, and in many cases, the names given to the sizes you used to play with can be particular to an area and time. Some names are universal, of course, but House of Marbles uses these terms:
- Peewee for our smallest 10-12mm marbles
- Small for our 14mm or 16mm marbles
- Medium for 22mm or 25mm marbles
- Giant for 35mm marbles
- Massive for 42mm marbles
- Enormous for 50mm marbles
Collectors’ marbles tend to come with specific mm sizes because each one can be of a unique size.
To ensure you are informed about all aspects of marble purchasing, we have created a dedicated page that provides information on marble variations, which can be found here.
There are also SO many more things that you can learn about marbles. This blog is really just the tip of the glass-iceberg, so to speak, and this is precisely the reason we have two publications dedicated to informing our customers about marbles. If you want to know more, please take a look at the following books that you can buy online from us:
- The Pocket Book of Marbles
- Marble Booklet – a popular abbreviated version of the above ‘Pocket Book of Marbles’
