Baked Marbles

How to make these amazingly awesome cracked marbles.

All you need:

• Some kids playing marbles
• Ice water
• An oven

Step 1: Baking Those Marbles

Simply take your standard every day kids playing marble.
I stumbled across the box of them i had as a kid...and subsequently organised them by colour.

1. Preheat your oven to around 200 degrees celsius.
2. Put marbles into oven.
3. Wait 20 minutes (roughly, you may find you need longer or less time depending on your oven)
4. Prepare bowl of water, in a plastic bowl! and a bit before taking marbles out throw in a handful or two of ice cubes
   *Be SUPER careful, some marbles will probably crack as the act of being so hot to so cold causes some of the weaker ones to break* This can potentially go flying and is therefore a danger to the eyes* (Never happened to me but you just don't know)
5. Pour all marbles into ice water
6. Listen to that sweet crackle

Step 2: All Done!

Carefully scoop them out, they will be more fragile so if you drop one on a hard floor it will smash to pieces, but aside from weak ones they aren't too bad.

Step 3: Now Go Forth!

And figure out what you can do with them

Comments

[GaryH8]

You mentioned them possibly throwing shards. You might advise your readers to use safety glass or goggles and perhaps you did because I am a skim or speed reader. There are many lawsuit happy people in his world, but if your as poor as myself and every other good American it would like be squeezing blood from a turnip.

[Gunther45]

My Grandmother used to do this me me back when I was a youngling in the 70's. I am 46 now and she was using probably her's and my mother and uncles marbles! It is OK to use modern marbles you just buy. But don't use old marbles!!! Sell them and buy bags of crap modern marbles! We killed lots of $$$ in marbels during those years. Just saying.

[jeanniel1]

DO be careful when pouring the marbles into the ice water. Glass can really travel when busy shattering. I work with hot furnace glass, and we toss the glowing molten glass into water to break them on purpose, but the harden glass that are still hot really crack, and are more unpredictable. Even a paper towel covering the opening would deflect any shards that try to escape.

Good on you for working with glass in such a way! Beautiful aren't they?

[Izzypup]

Very pretty! A high school friend of mine used to do the same sort of thing - except she FRIED her marbles. Yep, frying pan on stove top to ice water. I don't remember hers having as many cracks in them as yours. You've re-inspired me to try it myself. Thanks!

[AshleighC5]

I have seen the frying method about on the internet! I'm a bit of a laissez fair approach person so oven was simpler :p
But I found if the first time didn't crack them enough you can put them back into the oven and redo, and they will crack more, of course you do have a higher risk of breaking them doing so. Usually I'd have at least two break on a rebake

[Ultra-Indigo]

the irony here is that the marbles had to be annealed to keep this from happening in the fist place. they sure are pretty though.

[DIY Hacks and How Tos]

This looks really cool. These could make great Christmas ornaments.