Moon Marble Company

What can I say --I love my birthday. Maybe its because when I was a kid there was a group of five girls that had a party each year on our birthdays so it was always a fun day or maybe its because I just like an excuse to celebrate.

Kim, Marc, Aaron & Adam came to help make sure the day was fun. They started by buying my lunch at Free State Brewery in Lawrence. Normally, we would have spent time on Mass. Street shopping, but we decided to go to the marble factory instead.

One of Dan's gifts to me was Marci Penner's book The Kansas Guidebook for explorers. I was looking through it this morning when I noticed the little writeup about the Moon Marble Company in Bonner Springs. Since Bonner is only about 20 minutes east of Lawrence, we took off for there after our delicious meal at Free State. I had called ahead and found out they were having a marble making demonstration at 2:00 and we were on the bleachers and ready at that time.

Bruce Breslow is the owner of the Moon Marble Co. His location started out to be a custom cabinet making business. He made a few wooden toys on the side and searched out a place to buy marbles for the games, thus the beginning of his interest in marbles. It was his wife's gift of a hot head torch as a Holiday gift that provided the heat for his creativity. He showed us the first marbles he made. At that time he was very proud of the little globs of glass.

This is Bruce and his work table. As with artists, he had many items used in his craft within reach which made the table appear cluttered. The burner was behind the Pepsi can. Glass must be heated to 1,100 degrees to start melting. He accomplished this with the torch. As he put the glass tubes in the hot blue flame, the flame turned red. He explained this is the same principle as meteorites flying through space leaving a red trail.

These are the tiny glass bits he put inside the marble he made

He put the marble immediately

in the kiln so I don't have a

picture of it, but these are

examples of others he made

with the same process.

Dan's birthday present to me.





The end to a perfect birthday!