Eye On Design: Holiday Face Masks From Pomchies!

Dec2

pomchies pom mask assortment photo by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

The Holiday Season is upon us and, as predicted, we’re still wearing face masks to keep ourselves and others safe from the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Masks are now a part of everyday life, so it makes sense that consumer mask design continuously evolves to create products that are more comfortable, effective, and — very important — stylish. Previously here on The ‘Gig, we reviewed a line of fashion and lifestyle accessories from Pomchies, a certified woman-owned company with an interesting back-story.

pomchies holiday hair scrunchies photo by gail
Pomchies Hair Scrunchies 3-Pack in Holiday Colors

Heather Logan Clark created Pomchies in 2002 out of a desire to utilize swimsuit material remnants from her previous swimwear company. All Pomchies products are created using the highest quality swimwear fabric that is durable, waterproof, washable, reasonably priced and also eco-friendly. Earlier in 2020, Pomchies launched its Pom Mask line in quick response to the need for comfortable, breathable facial masks at the onset of Covid-19, and the company is now celebrating the sale of two million masks in just seven months!

pom masks holly berry duo photo by gail worley
Pomchies Pom Mask 2-Pack in Seasonal Holly Berry Print and Coordinating Gold Fabric

Thanks to popular demand for these easy-wearing masks, Pomchies has released a line of fun and cheerful seasonal holiday masks for all ages. Worleygig received a few sets of these masks for review on the blog and we are loving them!

Post Continues After The Jump!

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg Mural Goes Up at First Avenue and 11th Street!

Dec1

rbg mural panorama photo by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

The late Supreme Court Justice and champion of women’s rights, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has been honored with a gorgeous collage mural depicting her face among vibrantly-colored,  iconic images that reflect her wildly-accomplished career. Created by street artist Elle over a period of about ten-days in the first two weeks of November, the mural’s location at the southwest corner of First Avenue and 11th Street was formerly home to this mural by Shepard Fairey, which was completed in October of 2016. With the way this year has been going, we needed a fresh and inspiring new artwork in this space, and Elle really delivered.

rbg mural unfinished photo by gail

The mural is close enough to my home that I was able to visit the site at various stages of completion; my very first sighting occurring on November 13th, during one of my twilight-time walks. What luck to also capture this very colorful graffiti box truck, which was parked on First Avenue at the time.

See More Photos of Elle’s RBG Memorial Mural After The Jump!

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Andy Warhol, Portrait of Keith Haring and Juan Dubose

Nov30

keith haring and juan dubose by andy warhol photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

In the 1980’s, Andy Warhol befriended several young artists of notoriety, including Keith Haring, with whom he also collaborated. Celebrated for his public and socially conscious art, Haring is pictured here with his then-boyfriend, DJ Juan Dubose. This portrait (1983) is rare, within Warhol’s oeuvre and in the visual culture of its time, in its depiction of intimacy between an interracial same-sex couple.

Photographed, Against a Wallpaper Comprised of Warhol’s Silkscreened Celebrity Portraits, in The Jewish Museum in Upper Manhattan

Pink Thing of The Day: You Were Pretty Once By Kelly Chuning

Nov27

you were pretty once photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

An example of a ‘backhanded compliment’ if there ever was one, this felted wool artwork declaring “You Were Pretty Once,” in a lovely vibrant Pink color, was spotted by me last week while I was on a brief gallery crawl in Chelsea. It remind of something a (understandably) now-ex boyfriend once said to me along the lines of, “You looked really good last night. Of course, its been all downhill since then.” Needless to say (but you can see I am about to) we did not stay together long after that.

Photographed in the Field Projects Gallery.

Ceramic Cabbage Teapot

Nov26

ceramic cabbage teapot photo by gail worley
Photos By Gail

How did an ancient Asian tradition become something quintessentially British? The fashion for Tea drinking in Great Britain started at court in the later seventeenth century and spread among the aristocracy. Tea remained a heavily taxed luxury until a century later, 1n 1784, when tea duties were slashed from 119 to 12.5 percent, making it affordable to the general public.

In the eighteenth century, the rise of the East India Company — founded to trade with India, Southeast Asia, and China — led to a British monopoly on tea distribution. This global grip established the nation’s mercantile empire, critically dependent on colonial occupation and the movement of slaves. In 1771, American colonists famously protested Britain’s commercial control, dumping imported tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.

ceramic cabbage teapot photo by gail worley

Ambitious British pottery manufacturers and retailers leveraged tea’s popularity to their advantage, cultivating an enormous national ceramics industry. Vastly expanded production yielded new wares, materials and consumers. Profit margins on ceramics were slim, so quality mattered, as did efficiency. Resources and skills were often shared, as innovative makers sprung up and sometimes quickly failed. These developments signaled a shift — creative and economic — toward mass manufacture in a remarkably nimble market, generating a booming export industry for Britain as a result

Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Eye On Design: Interior Design Platform Modsy Reveals the Top Style Trends of 2020

Nov25

casual modern dining room in blue
Casual Modern Dining Space (All Images Courtesy of Modsy)

A few weeks into Manhattan’s Covid lockdown it became clear that I would be working from home for the long haul, so I created a small budget to upgrade my home office with a few new items. A new task chair, a small colorful rug, and a set of strategically-measured storage cubes helped to create a pleasant and comfortable workplace within my apartment, while optimizing the functionality in the 50-square foot room. Now that our homes are often serving as offices, and even classrooms, you might also be looking for design ideas for the way we live right now. With that in mind, Modsy, an online interior design platform, has just released its 2021 Trend Report, which is brimming with quarantine-inspired interior design trends, emerging style predictions for next year, product sales comparison insights, and survey data from thousands of people across the U.S.

elegant modern living room
Livingroom: Elegance Meets Modern Design

Let’s get inspired with a closer look at some of their findings!

Post Continues, With More Design Ideas, After The Jump!

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Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom in Madison Square Park

Nov24

light of freedom at night photo by gain worley
All Photos By Gail

On the Friday before Joe Biden’s electoral victory was officially announced, I had a late afternoon appointment near Madison Square Park. It was already twilight when I exited onto Fifth Avenue and 25th Street and I decided to walk home to take advantage of an unseasonably-warm evening and what I think of as the romantic atmosphere imparted by the newly-restored standard time. Darkness at night: what a concept. As I crossed Broadway I noticed a new piece of public art in the park which resembles the Statue of Liberty’s torch, entitled Light of Freedom. New York native Abigail Deville is the artist. I snapped a few photos and then continued on my way.

light of freedom at day photo by gail worley

This past Saturday, I had the chance to check out Light of Freedom in the daylight, where it’s easier to see that the torch’s flame is comprised of disembodied mannequin arms; something which I find very appealing.

light of freedom flame detail photo by gail worley

Let’s zoom-in for a closer look.

Here’s is an excerpt from Madison Square Park Conservancy’s statement on the piece:

Light of Freedom carries many cogent symbols. DeVille has filled a torch — referring to the Statue of Liberty’s hand holding a torch, which was on view in Madison Square Park from 1876 to 1882 — with a timeworn bell, a herald of freedom, and with the arms of mannequins, beseeching viewers. The scaffold, which prevents access physically and metaphorically, recalls a work site, an insistent image on the urban landscape. But the scaffold is golden, summoning the glory of labor and the luminosity in the struggle that can lead to change.  Formative to Light of Freedom are the words of the abolitionist, author, and statesman Frederick Douglass, who proclaimed in an 1857 speech delivered in Canandaigua, New York: “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” The torch refers to the light of democracy and its foundation in ancient systems of government by citizens.

DeVille has described working on this piece: “In my research, I have found that the first Blacks to be brought to New York City were eleven Angolans in 1626. That makes people of African descent the second-oldest group of settlers in New Amsterdam, after the Dutch. Unfortunately, history has erased the contributions and victories of this group. I want to make something that could honor their lives and question what it means to be a New Yorker, past, present, and future.”

light of freedom at night 2 photo by gail worley

Light of Freedom will be on Exhibit in Madison Square Park Through January 31st, 2021, so see it while you can!

Modern Art Monday Presents: Painting of Unknown Title By Yves Tanguy

Nov23

yves tangy title unknown photo by gail worley

Yves Tanguy’s debt to the still and imaginative landscapes of the Italian Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico is apparent in this work’s perplexing array of imagery that includes a small school of fish and child flattened by a cart. The plain white tower in the background — a favorite iconographic motif of de Chirico — secures the connection between the two artists. The title of this fun painting from 1926 is unknown

Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Pink Thing of The Day: Pink Ladies Room

Nov20

pink bathroom 2 photo by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

To be at an exhibit called Pink Jungle (at NYC’s Makeup Museum) and then to be further surprised by the discovery that they have a Pink Ladies Room is to be a very happy girl indeed. So. Much. Pink.

pink bathroom 3 photo by gail worley

The bathroom was also very clean and well-stocked with supplies. All good.

pink bathroom photo by gail worley

Worleygig.com Celebrates A Surprise Blogging Milestone!

Nov19

best day ever graphic

One of the many things that makes writing a blog exciting is when a post goes viral for an entirely unexpected reason — and what happened on Tuesday of this week was very unexpected! While making a routine check of my stats page shortly after 4:00 PM, I noticed, with a degree of astonishment, that the day’s traffic counter looked like this:

site traffic comparison

Um, wow: I couldn’t believe that the blog needed fewer than 100 visits to surpass its best traffic day ever (which, I will note, was several years in the past at this point)! I immediately checked my list of referrers (sites that are directing traffic to Worleygig) and noted that a huge amount of traffic was coming from this Reddit thread, which indirectly linked to This Post (from way back in 2011!) about a Pink Pig Chair. Yes I just typed that. Check it out for yourself below.

pig couch

It seems that the owner of this chair put it up for sale on Craigslist, which triggered the viral activity as the post was picked up by Reddit and then Twitter, and funneled over to me because of a completely incidental link to my post buried in the discussion. To add intrigue, a reporter from the New York Times also contacted me for a story she was researching about the Craiglist post! You can’t make this stuff up.

best day ever traffic graphic

At the end the day, we celebrated a record high number of visits to our humble little site. Even though the extra traffic will gradually dissipate until we are back to our normal flow, I am super grateful to the Internet gods that crazy things like this can occur.