Picture 014

These are marbles that no one could love. And the heartbreak is that I spent literally hours on them. I thought I would burn up some ugly glass just practising marble finishing, trying to make a real sphere. Nothing I did worked. I spent at least an hour on each of these horrible things, and they are far more awful than you can see from the picture. They are lumpy. They are not round. They have horrible surfaces with discontinuities between colours. On rec.crafts.glass someone introduced the phrase embarrassing the material -- meaning, making something so bad that you feel the glass itself is ashamed of you -- and I think at this point the glass was really wishing it didn't know me, that we had never met, and that I would go away and bother somebody else. These were the marbles that made me think I should just give up.