Angel in a Puffer Vest for SIA The Sense of Sight
- sallyinstpaul
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Marsha at Marsha in the Middle is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the 1895 painting "The Sense of Sight" by English artist Annie Louisa Swynnerton. She chose this painter to get a jump on Women's History Month for March, purposely picking a "not so famous female artist." She succeeded there for me because I had not heard of Swynnerton before!
For my interpretation, I chose to focus on the clothing worn by the angel (as she was named in another version of this painting) rather than the overall painting's color scheme, motifs, etc. Those dusky pinks, roses, and mauves of her dress are classic Soft Summer colors, which feels appropriate since the angel's own coloring fits the bill there very well. I hardly need an excuse to pull out my blush pink rabbit sweater, and I added the dusky rose pants and a new scarf in an odd-but-versatile dusky rose-mauve-taupe sort of color to complete my base outfit.
For additional warmth, I wore the pale pink long puffer vest that creates a lovely winter-spring "modern twin set" with the rabbit sweater.
Note: I was low-key terrified to find out that when you ask Google about the "angel in the puffer vest," it tells you all about the "biblically accurate angel puffers" or "seraphim puffers" that are a streetwear fashion item with fire and eye imagery. I prefer my angel puffer vest that could have come with the warning: Angel not included. It's a whole BYOA (Bring Your Own Angel) situation. In my case, I can't quite decide if I'm the angel in question or the bunnies are the angels.
I wore the scarf in the "loop to the front with ends loose" style (method #4 here) so that the bunnies were not completely obscured, which had the pleasing side effect that scarf has a drape that is reminiscent of the top part of the angel's dress.
My pinkish-pewter loafers with the faux snakeskin texture would have worked well in the last SIA with the snake-like dragon, but in this outfit, I just chose them for the color.
I built my daily bracelet stack (all DIY) around a new paper bead bracelet set I made to coordinate with the rabbit sweater. I already have a couple such sets with silver beads, so I decided to make one with gold instead. I rounded out the stack with simple pink and white beaded bracelets. {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}
I did not do a great job of documenting this paper bead bracelet set, but you can get a good sense of what the paper for the two tube bead bracelets looked like from the beads themselves: the top one is from an embroidered clothing item in a catalog, and the bottom one is from a printed bedspread in a catalog.
The middle bracelet with the paper bicone beads was made from a catalog image of a pink and beige rug that rolled up nicely into these beads with no doctoring of the paper on my part. I really like the visual texture these beads have, and the addition of the beige neutral to the bracelet set is nice. I decided upon wearing this bracelet set that I'd like to make a supplemental bracelet with alternating pink, beige, and maybe white beads (glass, gemstone, and/or wood) to go with it.
My DIY earrings are a fun pair that I made to go with the paper bead bracelet set in pink-beige and gold. In my stash, I found some Czech glass tooth/claw beads in a light pink with a travertine finish (that adds some earthy beige splotching over the bead) that I'd never known what to do with...until now. I strung five of them on a premade earring hoop with spacer beads around them to make a very simple claw earring. Angels are fierce as well as pretty, right? My husband called the earrings "raider chic" as a reference to the jewelry worn by raiders in the Fallout universe that frequently feature teeth and claws (which Google's AI accurately describes as reflecting a "scavenged, brutal, and often macabre aesthetic").
Now for the highlight of every Style Imitating Art post: revealing our Rabbit Imitating Art!
Today's bunny is a gorgeous red New Zealand rabbit in a cage who is yearning to break free. (As a rabbit in the 4H rabbit show at the Minnesota State Fair, he probably was safest in the cage rather than trying to madly dash for cover among all the clomping human feet and quick child-human hands at the fairgrounds!)
When the new angel was dispatched to earth as her very first assignment, she was equal parts excited and terrified because humans had such a reputation for chaos, difficulty, and confusion. But since her position on the data collection night shift involved staying hidden on the sidelines rather than interacting with anyone, she quickly adjusted to the new environment. Within a month, it was like she had been doing this work her whole life...which was actually literally true from day one but didn't feel true until a few weeks had passed.
However, one early spring morning after a very, very long night of counting, tabulating, and submitting numbers to the cloud, an intense bright light - the likes of which she'd never seen on earth - burst upon her vision: a message from HQ sent with the High Importance tag!
She was awed by the instructions contained therein: she needed to immediately travel to a small town halfway across the world to tell a woman some deeply implausible news regarding her future son. She had heard rumors that this project was in the works, but she thought that informing the human would surely be an archangel's job, not something for an entry-level number cruncher with no human communication experience to do!
No sooner had she thought this than the sky lit up with an explanation: it was Gabriel's assignment initially but he was WFH (working from heaven) while waiting for the cable guy to show up, which could take an eternity, so he'd passed the task on to her.
She was really scared of screwing this up, but Management, having run into a similar confidence issue before with Moses, was not sending her to speak to the human alone. Another mortal on earth had just submitted a request for an internship ("please free me from this cage and I will do anything you ask in return!") so she should take him along to assist. This assistant didn't talk at all, so he wouldn't make a great spokesman like Moses' brother Aaron, but he was so adorable and friendly and quite amazingly soft and pettable that he would put the human woman into a psychological state of bliss and surrender in which she would believe even the most incredible news.
But how would the angel know the moment has come when the woman will be receptive to the announcement? She should just use her elevated Sense of Sight to look and see when the woman's Sense of Touch was fully engaged by the furry little mortal assistant. "You'll know it when you see it."
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 Marsha in the Middle.
What aspects of this artwork would you use to inspire an outfit? Do you like to combine aesthetics - like feminine and fierce - in an outfit?
Blogs I link up with are listed here.