Today I'm continuing to show summer outfits and DIY paper bracelet sets. This time I'm focusing on some pants outfits as we have passed the worst dog days of summer. Hopefully this will give some late summer outfit inspiration as temperatures start to cool a bit. With each bracelet set, I will also show the magazine and/or catalog pages I upcycled to create them to provide some more examples of how a page becomes a bead in the paper bead making process.
Outfit #1
Let's start with some aloe vera crop pants that I paired for the first time with my sleeveless rabbit blouse and topped with a navy marl 3/4 sleeve cardigan. The blouse has a built-in bow so I didn't wear a necklace or scarf with it.
I like the various textures in this outfit: flat woven fabric and an eyelet yoke in the blouse, a marl knit in the cardigan, a subtle herringbone denim in the pants, and calf hair in the shoes.
I like statement earrings with this blouse; today, a pair of the world's easiest DIY hoop earrings in gold-tone with light green glass pearls that work well with my eye color. (I got a lot of different colors of glass pearls in a bulk purchase from Amazon, but often not enough beads in any one color to make something, so I had fun putting together earrings with beads in multiple variations of a single color for an ombré effect.)
My bracelet stack is 5 DIY pieces: in addition to the three paper bead bracelets, a square gold spacer bead bracelet and an olive serpentine bracelet with gold disk spacers.
For the top bicone bracelet, I used two identical catalog sweater images glued together to get about 7" of length in the triangular strips.
There was a fair amount of white on the strips, including some white text on top of the sweater images, so I doctored them with olive and navy marker on the tips and along the edges (the only areas that will show) so that the final beads had a navy/olive/beige color scheme. Due to the gluing of the original pages, a couple of the rolled beads are a little bit lumpy; I just put the lumpy-looking beads at the back when I made the bracelet and it was just fine. Remember, these are hand-crafted beads so any "imperfections" are just part of their charm!
For the tube beads, I had two copies of this shirt from a catalog; I cut them in half down the center to create four clean edges. I glued these four pieces to some magazine paper and rolled them with the cleanly cut edge at the end.
Somehow I didn't manage to take any photos of the paper used for the second bicone bracelet.
Outfit #2
Next are a pair of full-length heathery-textured sandstone coral pants that I wore with this loose and cool linen vertically striped top from Lands End that is one of my favorite summer stand-alone tops. This was another first time pairing as I continue to mix-and-match items from my closet rather than purchasing new clothes. (Coincidentally, Carol at Scribbling Boomer just showed an outfit with her identical top in this great post about how to de-emphasize a large bust.)
This is the only scarf I own that has jewelry built into it. I'm not generally a huge fan of this type of scarf for myself (it is often too dramatic and bling-y for my personal style) but I do like this one with the pretty textured gold medallion and the ombré fabric in soft, cool shades of beige/tan/taupe. (The price was right for this experiment too; it cost $2.99 at ThredUp.)
To pick up the "peachy" quality of the top and pants, instead of straight gold earrings, I added rose gold leather earrings (which also match my eyeglasses).
This bracelet stack is one I designed in a sandstone coral/brown/gold color palette with this specific outfit in mind! In addition to the three DIY paper bead bracelets, I also made bracelets from rust carnelian beads and rose brown glass beads with gold rose motif spacers.
The tube beads started life as this pretty coral/brown/beige cardigan image in a Coldwater Creek catalog. I cut a vertical line on the left side of the cardigan image to be the edge of the strips that I cut horizontally across it. I was only able to get 9 rectangular 0.5" wide strips from the image (I usually need about 12 to make a bracelet), but I just added extra spacer beads to the back side of the bracelet (where they don't really show anyway) to make it the size I needed.
Sometimes the skin tone of catalog models works against your desired color scheme, but sometimes it fits right in. This page from a Lands End catalog is a good example of the latter! The model's rich medium brown skin is just right for the sandstone coral/brown/gold color palette. And I liked the peach color of the sweatshirt as a light version of the sandstone coral. I didn't get a photo of it, but after I cut the triangular strips, I covered the "off" colors, like the pale grey background, with a brown marker so that the rolled beads were within the color palette with no extraneous colors. I love the rich ombré stripe pattern in the final beads. I strung them with warm brown crystal glass beads to make the bracelet.
The third set of paper beads were made from this gorgeous photo from a wall calendar. Because the purple-blue sky is not part of my color palette, I removed the top part of the image (and saved it for later use!) before cutting my triangular strips from the remaining sandstone paper.
The calendar is a relatively thick paper (with the typical white core), so I used a gold metallic marker along the long edges of the strips. This added pretty gold striping to the rolled beads.
Outfit #3
Finally, I built my last outfit using a pair of light pink ankle pants. Last month in my Pantone spring/summer 2022 beauty bundle post, I shared this outfit idea for an analogous color scheme using the Pantone "dahlia" color accessory set with Red-Violet's color wheel neighbor of pink (i.e., red with white added to it).
Earlier this month I wore a version of that outfit substituting a white tank + white cardigan for the pink top and adding a lavender ombré scarf with a white scarf ring. I normally would have worn my violet ankle pants in this outfit, so I was a bit outside my comfort zone with the pink.
For the earrings, I wanted a pair with both pink and purple tones on a silver hoop, so I used these world's easiest DIY earrings with pink and mauve glass pearls on silver hoops.
To continue to reinforce the pink color in my accessories, I started my bracelet stack with a set of DIY paper bead bracelets in a purple/blue/pink/white/silver color scheme that I had made to wear with an outfit featuring a scarf with those colors. To those I added three more me-made bracelets: purple stone beads in two sizes with silver spacers (and another sweet bunny face charm) and white glass beads.
For the tube beads, I could not resist these two color-splattered print top images from Chadwick's catalog. They are in the desired color scheme and would coordinate well with each other due to the similarity of the prints. But I only had one small image of each top! I was able to cut the purple one in half, but due to the positioning of the model's arm, I couldn't do that with the white one. I glued each piece to a magazine page and cut the 0.5" rectangular strips that I could: 8 purple and 6 white. They rolled up into really fun, colorful beads! (Excuse the blurriness of the purple bead photo.)
I used silver flower and spacer beads between the paper beads to make the purple bracelet long enough, and I added a series of white glass pearls at the back of the white bracelet to extend its length.
The purple striated bicone beads are another set for which I didn't get photos of the original image.
I'm really enjoying making these upcycled paper beads, and it's amazing how having a new set of bracelets brings revived interest and energy to not-new clothing and outfits.
Other posts in this series:
This post was sponsored by the word "ombré"...or at least it would have been if this were Sesame Street!
Do you wear pants in the summer? When do you start to wear them fairly regularly?
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