Summer Necklace Layering With a Print Topper + DIY Paper Bracelet Page to Bead Examples

One of the signs of summer in St Paul, MN is I start wearing my sadly-shrunken rabbit blouse as a topper layer over a sleeveless tank with layered necklaces!

I repeated the rabbit blouse + peacock blue tank pleasing pairing I stumbled upon last summer, this time with denim ankle pants.

OOTD 6/2/23

I layered 10 long white/grey/black seed bead strands, a long multi-chain necklace with a few blue beads on it, and a shorter hematite bead necklace made by a friend. Although it's a lot of individual pieces, the overall effect is a rather neat and tidy layered necklace because all but one of the strands is the same length. I think this look would seem more finished to my eye if I'd added a pendant necklace to sit between the upper and lower strands, but I'd wanted to try it without one.

I wore my grey leopard wedges yet again, continuing to work down that cost per wear, and it made for a fun animal print + zoological print mix.

My daily bracelet stack is based on a paper bead bracelet set that I made specifically to wear with the rabbit blouse in black, dark blue, white, and silver. I added a handsome rabbit head charm to one of the paper bead bracelets for yet more bunny goodness.

The beads in the top (rabbit charm) bracelet started out as this rather plain page from an alumni magazine that had the color scheme I was going for. I thought the shiny crystal plate was an interesting element of the image and was curious about how it would look when rolled. After cutting my triangular strips, I added silver marker to cover the white paper core at the edges, and I doctored the ends of a couple of the strips with some black marker so that none of the rolled beads had white centers. I like the range of black/blue/grey colors in the beads, and I think the crystal plate lent wonderful visual texture to the result.

A trio of jeans in medium blue, black, and dark blue on a white background from a (rare) Christopher & Banks catalog was perfect for this set. Because the jeans were centered against the white, all of my strips had white at both ends, which meant the beads would all have white centers (hence my decision to make the beads from the page above not have white centers). As with the previous paper, I edged the strips in silver marker, but otherwise I left them in their original state. I love the high contrast optic look of the beads, which is such a good fit for the rabbit print of the blouse.

I found another, previously unshared OOTD featuring the rabbit blouse as shirt-jacket with the same hematite bead necklace and black/grey/white seed bead strands...plus a lot of other necklaces for a more #neckmess level of layered look. This outfit has two pendant necklaces, so combined with the zero pendant necklaces above, that averages out to one pendant per outfit.

OOTD 9/3/21

For pendant overload, it's hard to beat this #neckmess with 5 pendants! I'd placed the two white crystal pendants - a heart and 3 stacked circles - on the same chain, which is something I need to remember to do again because it's an interesting look. Of course I am a huge fan of the White Rabbit pendant worn with this blouse featuring black and white rabbits!

OOTD 10/8/21

Now it's time for our Rabbit of the Day selection. Either a white or a black rabbit is a natural choice, but I went with a particular type of white rabbit that is an especially good color match to the rabbit blouse because he has blue eyes! Blue-eyed whites (BEW) are the second type of white rabbit after the red-eyed white (REW). REW are true albinos in which recessive genes at the C locus eliminate all pigment in their fur and eyes (the eyes look pink/red due to blood vessels inside them). But BEW have a different pair of recessive genes that causes the eyes to have pigment in the outer layer but not the inner layers, so that only the light with short wavelengths (blue) is reflected (source). Regardless of the science, isn’t the BEW utterly precious with those cornflower blue eyes?

Have you been wearing necklaces this summer? How about bracelets? Statement earrings? Or do you skip jewelry in the heat?

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