Creating a Jewelry Set for a Brown Art-Inspired Fall Outfit for SIA Autumn

Shelbee at Shelbee on the Edge is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected 1573 painting "Autumn" by Italian Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. She chose this painter because he is "known for creating heads out of random objects like fruits, vegetables, flowers, and even books...[they] are so clever and really crack me up."

Source: shelbeeontheedge.com

She selected this specific artwork was an obvious choice since we are "truly in autumn now." And I have to agree! We are finally experiencing cooler fall temperatures (though not yet sweater weather for me) and the leaves are starting to change over into the brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds of autumn. There is still a good amount of early fall green in my neighborhood, creating a gorgeous combination of traditional fall color against a bright green and sky blue background on sunny days. (The day after I took this photo, we fell into rainy weather, so my world outside is a lot more greyed-out-looking than this right now.)

Early Fall Foliage and Sunny Skies - St Paul, Minnesota - October 19, 2025

The most notable aspects of this painting are the dark autumnal color palette and the strong nature elements (the aforementioned fruits, vegetables, and flowers plus grains and wood), which immediately brought to mind my woodland critters T that is a favorite for late summer and fall outfits. (I wore the matching woodland critters scarf with DIY paper bead bracelets and squirrel charm earrings in my recent Thrifty 6 lace outfit.) For some low-key print mixing, I also pulled out an ancient pair of brown plaid sneakers in a coordinating color palette.

I considered wearing black pants or jeans with the top to play up the black background of the painting, but when I consulted my outfit spreadsheet, I discovered that I'd never worn this top with my brown jeans! Because the top already has a black background like the painting, I took advantage of this opportunity to lean into the brown tones with my jeans and sneakers; in this context, the brown jeans remind me of a brown tree trunk...which I could readily imagine forming the body of the man below the painted head, if that makes sense.

OOTD 10/18/25

The various straight lines of the plaid fabric and the shoelaces of my sneakers reminded me of the slats on the wooden barrel in the painting, and I liked the repetition of some of the lighter cream and orange tones from the painting.

I was pretty excited to use the painting and the woodland critters print as inspiration to create a full jewelry set for this challenge. I wanted the pieces to coordinate without being too matchy-matchy so that I would enjoy wearing all the pieces together with this outfit. When I make a jewelry set, I like to start with the necklace(s), then the bracelet(s) and earrings.

I began by selecting a couple past bead boxes from Bargain Bead Box - the Leafy Landscape box, the Woodland Whimsy box, and a companion bundle to another box. I selected the perfectly autumnal picasso jasper beads from Leafy Landscape, the olive agate druzy beads from Woodland Whimsy, and brown tiger-eye beads from the bundle as the starting point for necklaces. I found some large olive and brown crackle glass beads, brown crystals, and a silver leaf pendant from Curated Bead Box that coordinated well, then rounded things out with some fall-toned glass leaves, more tiger-eye, dark yellow glass beads, and silver spacer beads from my stash.

I had plenty of beads to make 3 layering necklaces. The short one intersperses the 8mm round picasso jasper beads with 4mm silver spacers for a simple strung necklace. The middle one is another strung design that has a pattern of squared picasso jasper beads, round tiger-eye, agate druzy, crystal rondelles, and 3mm silver spacers with a small pendant I made with a couple different shapes of tiger-eye. The long one is a beaded chain necklace with larger crackle glass and tiger-eye beads with a layered pendant I made by wire-wrapping leaf beads to a chain of jump rings in a cascading pattern to mimic falling leaves, placing that in front of the large silver leaf pendant. (I have a close up of the pendant in a later image for a better look at it.)

I made an easy 6-round memory wire bracelet using beads from my Bead Color Mixes that I discussed in detail in this bead organization post - I used my mixes in Brown, Tan/Beige, Yellow-Orange, Rust, Olive/Forest Green, and Silver. Because I was going for a woodsy feel, I also pulled out my wood bead jar (where I keep random wood beads in shades of brown, beige, cream, and black) to up the wood quotient of the bracelets. I used a colorblocking pattern with 5 beads in the same color family in a row before switching to the next color.

For my earrings, I used the beads and motif bead dangle design (#8 in this post) with a brown tiger-eye, silver disk spacer, and olive crackle glass "stick" with a yellow-olive leaf bead dangle. (I purposely used a type of leaf bead on the earrings that was different from those on my necklace so they wouldn't be matchy-matchy. I was going for that mixture of leaves that you get in the woods where different trees are close together and drop their leaves.)

I called this jewelry set my Leafy Autumn collection (combining the names of the Leafy Landscape box and the Autumn painting). I was very happy to be successful in creating coordinating jewelry that goes well together but isn't matchy-matchy (for example, the pieces don't all include the same beads). Like the trees in the woodland print top and the nature elements of the painting, there's a sense of a variety of related but distinct things coming together in a pleasing harmony. Even if you don't make jewelry yourself, you can use similar thinking to select your combination of jewelry for an outfit.

Now for my favorite part of the post: selecting our Rabbit Imitating Art! In the painting, my attention was drawn to the large cream/white vegetable (squash?) that forms the back/top section of the head (a hat?). The lightness of this area created a nice contrast to the darkness of the painting overall. I decided to audition rabbits with a similar light color and rounded shape, and right away, this sweet little red-eyed white (REW) Netherland Dwarf rabbit in a perfect Loaf of Bun pose won me over. What better bunny to stand out against the backdrop of dark autumnal tones than a pure white rabbit? And what a perfect blend of Halloween-ish cute and spooky we get with a tiny 2 pound rabbit that has little devil-horn ears and glowing pink-red dyes! (The white fur and red eyes are caused by recessive albino genes that prevent the creation of pigment in the body, so the fur is colorless white and the red blood vessels in the eyes a pink cast.)

So I didn't hesitate for a moment to cast this REW in the role. But the more I looked at this little rabbit, the more vampirical he started to look! Was this rabbit an ancestor of the infamous Bunnicula?!

History tells us that Bunnicula sucked the juice out of vegetables with his dainty rabbit fangs (but was otherwise harmless). No one knows where his vampiric traits came from or how he ended up in a movie theater while Dracula was playing. One hypothesis is that repeated exposure to the film caused a once-normal rabbit to develop vampiric attributes, preferences, and behaviors. But I believe this artwork reveals a different mechanism at work!

Bunnicula was a grand combination of outward innocence and stealthy juice-sucking. Despite the copious evidence to the contrary, humans in Bunnicula's world mistook him for a regular rabbit, never imagining that he was responsible for the juiceless produce routinely found in their home. They proposed a variety of implausible alternative explanations, such as plant disease, a broken refrigerator, bad batches of veg from the grocery store, and the use of pesticides. Bunnicula was a perfect produce predator, sucking the veggies dry while seeming to all the world a simple sweet normal bunny rabbit.

It stands to reason that such perfection would require refinement over a long period of time, much longer than the theatrical window of a Halloween-themed scary movie! And the existence of vampire rabbits that predate Bunnicula, such as the vampire rabbit of Newcastle, also suggest that vampirism among rabbits did not start with Bunnicula.

It makes sense that Bunnicula would be descended from a very long line of vampiric rabbits, and the REW in the Autumn painting could be one of them, perhaps even the first! He was clearly attracted by the juicy fruits and vegetables in this artwork, settling himself comfortably next to several bunches of luscious grapes. Of course any rabbit might want to eat grapes, so how is this at all suspicious?

Consider the strange colorless squash that the rabbit just so happens to be covering up with his casual loaf! Is that a mere coincidence? I think not! While I still lack definitive proof of my theory, I will be conducting independent research, culminating with my paper, "The Complexly Related Origins of the Vampire Rabbit and the White Pumpkin during the Renaissance," coming soon to a non-peer-reviewed online journal near you! (Or whenever my funding runs out.)

Artwork "improved" with rabbit

If you need any further evidence that AI is not equipped to replace human intelligence, consider what Google's AI says about this seminal work in historical biology:

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 Shelbee on the Edge.

Has fall weather arrived where you live? Do you like nature motifs for autumn style? Do traditional fall colors appeal to you? Do you like wearing jewelry sets (that you made yourself or that you purchased)? Have you ever curated a jewelry set from your wardrobe? Do you believe in the red-eyed white rabbit's innocence and normalcy...or do you suspect him of vampirical traits?

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