It’s been a year in the making, but the time is finally here:
Accents Glassworks is officially open! To celebrate, we’re throwing a huge party on Saturday,
February 28. If you love glass (whether you’re an experienced glass artist, an aspiring lampworker, or a collector of finished pieces) and you’re anywhere within driving distance of Washington, DC, we want you to come join us!
If you haven't been to see us yet: we're located at 12118 Nebel St., Rockville, MD 20852.
We’ll open at our usual time, 10am. Because we’re expecting a large turn-out, we will NOT be offering daily rentals in the studio, but we will be offering a special rate of $10 per hour, and you can rent for as many hours as you’d like. Rentals will be first-come, first served, but we will maintain a waiting list if you arrive later in the day and all the stations are full when you arrive. As always, your rental fee includes the use of a Carlisle Mini-CC (or CC, for a slight additional fee) and access to an appropriately programmed, digitally-controlled kiln for annealing your work.
We’re extremely fortunate that some of the great folks from
Carlisle Machine Works will be joining us for the day. They’ve already been a huge help with the technical aspects of optimizing our torch set-up, so we’re glad that they’re coming to celebrate with us. In addition,
Frank Dougherty has generously volunteered to help us conduct safety orientations for beginning lampworkers during the day.
Many of our talented local glass artists have also volunteered to conduct demonstrations during the day. Here’s a partial schedule:
1 PM –
Clare Nykolyszyn (Crow Candy in the forum)
2 PM –
Anderson Coats
3 PM –
Frank Dougherty
4 PM –
Clare Nykolyszyn
5 PM –
John Winter
6 PM –
Rose Bettis
7 PM –
Anne Cleo Dunsmore (Grama Tortoise)
8 PM –
Lisa St. Martin (LisaSt.Martin)
Other artists may be added to the schedule, and Anderson will be demonstrating throughout the day. We’ll be adding a follow-up to this post a little later with biographical information on all of our demonstrating artists.
We’re also delighted to announce that we have an awesome and GENEROUS group of suppliers, and many of them have pledged gifts for us to distribute as door prizes. So far, we can promise that there will be glass samples from
Trautman Art Glass,
Double Helix Glassworks, and
Creation is Messy in the mix, and we expect to be adding more names to that list.
Accents Beads, our sister shop, will be providing prizes that will help you turn your beads into a wearable work of art.
Carlisle Machine Works is also contributing three gift certificates (two $50, and one $100).
Phillips Safety Products is contributing to the kitty. Additionally, the
Society of Glass Beadmakers, Mid-Atlantic chapter has donated a free one-year membership to their group. And you know we’ll be adding some prizes to the pile, too. A huge “thank you” goes out to everyone who is contributing to making this day special for our customers.
In addition to the door prizes already listed above, we will have two special, separate drawings going on.
Anderson Coats, our resident artist and studio head, has donated a beautiful piece of his original art. For every hour of studio time that you rent on February 28th, you will receive a ticket for this drawing, so the longer you work, the better chance you will have of winning. The remaining drawing will be open to people who register for a class at Accents Glassworks – and again, the more classes you register for, the greater your chance of winning. However, the donor of this prize has asked to be
anonymous, at least for the time being. Let’s just say it’s a REALLY awesome prize!
We’ll also be providing refreshments.
Even though our regular closing time is 9 PM (and we'll do our final drawings at that time), we're not the kind of people who like to break up a good party - so Anderson promises that we'll stay open until everyone is ready to go home. (But if you keep us here 'til 10am Sunday morning, be ready for the studio rental rates to go back up to normal!)
You all know how awesome the glass community is, so we’re really looking forward to a fun day of camaraderie, creativity, celebration . . . and loot! Come join us! If you have any questions, feel free to message us here, or sign up for our mailing list at our website. We’ll update this thread as more details become available.
Hope to see lots of you on the 28th!
And remember, out address is at the top of this post, just in case you want to start planning your trip now . . . .