How to Style a Brown and Lace Spring Outfit for SIA: Book of Hours + DIY Jewelry

Salazar at 14 Shades of Grey is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected a 14th century Book of Hours by unknown French artists. She says she's been on a medieval kick lately, and the intricate lacy cutouts along the page borders of this book really sets it apart from other medieval manuscripts. She sees both lace and crochet as on point for this challenge, but also thinks the illustrations in the book could serve as a source of inspiration.

Source: 14shadesofgrey.wordpress.com

My immediate reaction was "too bad I don't have any lacy cream-colored items to wear for this challenge," but I turned to my digital closet's Beige/Ivory/Cream/Tan folder to see what I had to work with instead. Of course, I re-discovered my thrifted ivory lace jacket that I typically wear in the summer and realized that with the unseasonably warm April weather we're having, I could probably make the jacket work! My digital closet also offered up a pair of lace/eyelet cream Skechers sneakers that I only wear for ultra-casual walkabouts or exercise, and while I tried to dismiss them from my mind, I couldn't un-think the possibility of styling them in a "normal" outfit for the first time.

With the lacy cream pages of the book represented, I created the base of my outfit in brown to match the book cover: an inner column consisting of a brown short-sleeved T and brown straight leg jeans (one of my Pleasing Pairings). Although dark brown is a color we typically associate with fall, there is no law against wearing it in the spring and summer too. After all, trees retain their brown bark when they are blooming as well as when they're bare! With the light color and warm-weather-appropriate open weave fabric of the jacket worn over the brown column, the outfit doesn't look like I tripped on a time machine and stumbled from November to April. (This is my second "fall colors in spring" response to an SIA challenge this month; it was not intentional!)

OOTD 4/22/24

Wearing these sneakers in the outfit was definitely outside my comfort zone, but I'm not sure there's ever been a time to style sneakers in an outfit than during a "sneakers with everything" fashion moment. This is probably not something I will start doing on the regular, but I enjoyed the double-lace action of the sneakers in this particular outfit, and I am glad I tried it out.

In another departure from my usual styling, I decided to button up the lace jacket (rather than leaving it open in the front) to create a clean backdrop for the many-shades-of-neutral leopard print scarf. One of the benefits of an open jacket worn over an inner column is that it creates a pleasing vertical integrity rather than cutting your body in half where the jacket ends. But with my scarf worn long this way (method 1 here), I added my own vertical line that softened the impact of the potentially harsh vertical line between the light colored jacket and dark colored pants. I would call this combination "just flattering enough."

Leopard print is not an obvious spring print, but it's a classic that works in every season. I liked the mix of black and every shade of brown from cream through taupe through dark brown on offer in this scarf as a bridge piece to connect the ivory and brown colors of my outfit. I have other scarves that combine cream and brown, but the all-neutral color scheme of this one felt just right for the inspiration artwork.

My daily bracelet stack is based on a paper bead bracelet set in the same colors as the scarf, though I didn't intentionally create the bracelets to match it. I just find a lot of value in accessories that help bridge the black/brown divide, which can be a little hard to come by in stores aside from animal prints. This made a DIY paper bead bracelet set that brings black, brown, tan, and gold together in an intentional-looking way an obvious project for me. To the two paper bead bracelets, I added four other neutral DIY bracelets: a mixed metal spacer bead bracelet (with silver, gunmetal, gold, hematite, and bronze colors), a brown tiger-eye bracelet, the black glass bead bracelet with silver and gold spacers you see all the time, and a rose brown glass bead bracelet with gold rose-shaped spacer beads (see what I did there). {bicone paper bead tutorial} {stretch bracelet tutorial}

The top paper bead bracelet started out as a Coldwater Creek catalog page featuring a beige, tan, and black skirt outfit. Naturally these rolled up into nice striped beads in that color scheme.

I made the bottom bracelet beads from this full-page image from an alumni magazine. I loved the rich tones of brown and black in this photograph. I covered the white paper cores with gold marker applied to the edges, which lent a pretty gilded look to the rolled beads.

I chose a new pair of DIY bead soup earrings in a brown and antique bronze colorway for a subtle finish to my outfit. I stacked two colors/sizes of glass pearl with bronze spacers and a larger brown oval glass bead for a very simple design.

Now for the main event: our Rabbit Imitating Art selection! I love the heathery visual texture of a rabbit with an agouti (wild-rabbit-looking) coat, and I thought the subtlety of this Chinchilla rabbit would be a nice accompaniment to the artwork.

But I really didn't think that through, did I? The artwork is a book, and the book has pages made of paper, and rabbits...well, as you could easily imagine, rabbits love to nibble on paper. So this is as much a Rabbit Ingesting Art as a Rabbit Imitating Art. Perhaps one of the unknown French artists responsible for this lovely Book of Hours was a lapin who delicately nibbled the lacy texture in the pages?? For a fun exploration of the rabbit in the Middle Ages, check out this post complete with drawings of killer rabbits in medieval manuscripts.

Book of Hours "improved" with rabbit

To close out this post, I'm showing a couple of OOTD featuring this ivory lace jacket that I haven't previously shared. As you can see, I typically wear the jacket open rather than buttoned as part of a straight up summer outfit.

OOTD 7/29/20

OOTD 7/13/22

I can't remember if I've shared these extra large gold hoop earrings that came in a grab bag of beads/findings (Boss's Bead Bag from Fire Mountain Gems), but they are a lot of fun. It's interesting because I'm sure they are intended as a starting point for adding wire-wrapped beads or something, but I think with their large size that they look great plain.

Thanks for joining me today for this Style Imitating Art + Rabbit Imitating (and Improving) Art post!

To see other outfit interpretations of this artwork, check out the review on 14 Shades of Grey.

Do you have any lace or crochet items that you wear in the spring/summer? Do you wear dark brown in the warm seasons? Do you ever wear sneakers in not-entirely-casual outfits?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.