How to Wear a Floral Cardigan in Fall + DIY Jewelry Set Inspired by a Shirt

It's been a while since I've done a straight up outfit of the day post that wasn't inspired by a style challenge, so today I'm sharing a recent outfit that demonstrates a way to style a floral cardigan in fall.

Floral prints are not an obvious autumn choice compared to things like leaves, pumpkins, etc., but there is no rule that you have to match your clothing and accessory motifs directly to what actually exists in nature during a particular season! (If there were such a rule, I might as well just give up now and create a winter wardrobe that is 100% grey and white with snowflake motifs to match the Minnesota scenery.) You can definitely wear florals in the fall and have your look be seasonally relevant. (And of course you can wear an outfit that is diametrically opposed to the season if you want to!)

In this example, I started my outfit with a floral cardigan in a muted color palette that is great for fall with shades of olive-y green, dark warm blue, rusty mauve, and warm grey against a dull, greyed mint background. I wore the cardigan over a simple dark blue inner column of color consisting of a peacock blue tank (that matches the blue accent in the cardigan well) and blue straight leg jeans. (I like having dark blue tops that I can pair with blue jeans into a column of color so I make sure I have at least one for every season). I love the warmer tones of the rich peacock blue as an alternative to a cooler navy at this time of year because it combines so well with the warm colors we tend to wear in fall. Of course navy or another shade of dark blue would have worked well, and any color of column that coordinated with the cardigan could be subbed in. Wouldn't burgundy be a nice choice, for example?

OOTD 10/22/24

The cardigan doesn't actually have any brown in it, but it always feels like it does, so I like to wear brown leather with it. I'm enjoying wearing these brown flats while the weather stays warm enough to put off pulling out my boots. (It's 35F and lightly snowing outside as I write this on Halloween, but it's warm enough in my apartment that I'm wearing a very similar style of flats today!)

I layered a short aqua and silver teardrop necklace with a recent DIY paper bead necklace I made to coordinate with a floral shirt (not this cardigan) in shades of mint/sky blue and coral/rust [to be shown later in the post]. I liked how the lighter coral-colored stone beads popped against the darker and/or more muted background colors of my outfit while still working with the color palette.

I upcycled a Christmas card to make the paper beads for the necklace. The front of the card featured a white polar bear with a reddish-coral area at the bottom. I lightly applied some sky blue acrylic paint to the card to bring it into my desired color palette. Then I painted the plain white back of the card with sky blue, reddish-coral, and silver paint in a colorblocked design that I embellished with black squiggles for extra interest. These strips rolled up into 10 1" long 8mm paper beads that I used with stone beads and silver spacers to make my beaded chain necklace.

I built my bracelet stack around a paper bead bracelet set in similar colors that had been inspired by the same shirt as the necklace, though seriously, it matches this cardigan even better! I supplemented my stack with several DIY glass and stone bead bracelets plus the rust agate bracelet with the rabbit charm that was a gift from my husband. Aren't the deer and rabbit an adorable duo? {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}

The top paper bead bracelet with the deer charm started out as a Lands End magazine cover featuring a colorful swimsuit cover up on a model standing against a water and trees backdrop. I actually really liked the range of colors for these beads, so the only doctoring I did to the strips was to edge the strips with silver marker to cover the white paper core and blot out the model's eyes and teeth (because they can be weirdly noticeable in a rolled bead). To me, the finished beads look like they were made specifically for this cardigan, even though they weren't.

The second paper bead bracelet (fourth from the top) used tube paper beads I upcycled from two Coldwater Creek catalog pages featuring a woodland print scarf on the edge (it was featured in two consecutive catalogs). Tube beads are the perfect thing to make when you have only a small amount of your desired paper. I painted both ends of each rolled bead with silver metallic paint before sealing them. I love how well the small scale of the gorgeous leafy print on the page translated into beads. Since even I can't justify buying every print scarf that strikes my fancy, it's nice to be able to add these prints to my wardrobe through paper beads!

The third paper bead bracelet (bottom of the stack) was made with this cover of The Economist featuring a nice sky blue/mint and rusty orange-red color palette and a simple geometric design...that represents the coronavirus, which is not an obvious choice for jewelry! But because the scale of the image is large, you don't see any of that detail in the finished beads.

Rounding out my jewelry selections is a new pair of bead soup earrings I made to go with the bracelet set. I chose a bright aqua glass bead and two bronze beads plus silver bead caps for each earring, arranged in a simple stack. I purposely pulled out some minor accent colors from the paper bead bracelets so they would coordinate without being overly matchy-matchy. The combination of the metallic bronze faceted bead and the silver findings gives a bit of a mixed metal vibe, which I like.

Here is the inspiration floral shirt with the various pieces I put together to create a coordinated DIY jewelry set. I have another pair of earrings planned for this set using silver deer charms to match the one on the bracelet, and I will probably make other pieces to join this little grouping in the future. I'm enjoying putting together DIY jewelry collections where pieces can be mixed and matched rather than always worn together as a determined set. The choice of wearing eclectic pieces, coordinating pieces, or more strictly matching sets is such a personal preference, but all points on the spectrum of eclectic to matching are available to you when putting your own jewelry sets/collections/beauty bundles together...whether the pieces are purchased, handmade, or some combination of the two.

Do you wear floral prints in the fall and/or winter? Do you like to mimic the motifs found in nature during the current season? Do you ever like to wear something opposite to the current season? Where do you tend to fall on spectrum of eclectic jewelry, coordinated jewelry, and matching jewelry? Do you wear the pieces of a matching set together, break them up, or both? Do you have any navy or blue tops that you can use to make a column of color with blue jeans?

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