Where Bloggers Live: Rabbits Improving Art and Making History

Welcome back to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live! I am lucky to have joined a terrific group of bloggers who give a peek into the places and spaces where they spend their time.

Today's topic is...2025 Wrap Up/Best of 2025...and you probably know that I think the best part of my blog in 2025 was Rabbits Improving Art!

Every two weeks, the Style Imitating Art (SIA) team (Shelbee, Salazar, and Marsha) present a style challenge in which they share a work of art for us to interpret sartorially. Because this world of my own is rabbit-centric, I also share a version of the artwork which has been improved with the addition of a rabbit. These rabbits always have a story attached, sometimes exploring a secret from history that is revealed on this blog for the first time.

In 2025, three SIA challenges did not make it to my blog, though I did submit outfits for the gallery of style posts that the teams share for two of them (the other I missed entirely). So I will start this Rabbits Improving Art round up by sharing the artworks, outfits, and rabbits for those two. Better late than never??

SIA Katherine Parr

I wasn't feeling the color black for this challenge, but I was happy to combine white and maroon in summer-friendly fabrics for my outfit.  As soon as I saw her white collar, I knew I could use my collared shirt to mimic something specific from her clothing.  It was a happy coincidence that I'd just made a three-piece layered necklace in maroon/dark red/gold that, interspersed with three pearl necklaces (a mix of faux and real pearls), let me bring in some of the sumptuous bejeweled aspect of her look.  Faux pearl drop earrings and a bracelet stack with real pearls, garnet beads, gold metallics, and paper beads finished off the outfit.  I liked how this one turned out!

SIA Textile Waves

I put together an outfit in the cream and soft green color scheme of the artwork with a lace-front top providing extra texture.  I wore DIY layered necklaces and bracelets in a range of natural materials and finished off the look with a quick pair of shabby lace earrings (under 5 minutes to create).

I put all the rabbits from 2025 Style Imitating Art/Rabbit Improving Art challenges together into one photo. Aren't they gorgeous?

The rabbits have been so busy this year! Let's review what they've been up to. (Click the link on each title to see the original blog post with all the details.) Events listed in chronological order starting in January...

#1 SIA Layered Sand: Artist Andrew Clemens inspired a very unlikely emulator as explained in this previously untold story of an ambitious immigrant who made an unexpected friend.

#2 SIA Joan of Arc: The young Joan of Arc was visited by angels and saints, as well all know, but she had a secret visitor...an omen of future English aggression...who did quite a number on her scarf.

#3 SIA Diamond Dust Shoes: All the rabbits from previous Rabbits Improving Art gathered together in one place - an absolute plethora of bunnies.

#4 SIA Egon Schiele: While sitting to have his portrait painted, artist Anton Peschka reflects on why creating artwork that looks like a knock-off of a knock-off isn't...or is?...wrong...one or the other...he thinks. He needs to ask Egon.

#5 SIA Sol LeWitt: A museum-dwelling rabbit is inspired to imagine a delicious conceptual vegetable/fruit hybrid by the human nonsense "Wall Drawing Number Whatever by That Absent Dude."

#6 SIA White Rabbit: A rabbit's lament for the difficulties and indignities imposed by dressing in the raiment of a Victorian gentleman contrasts with rather earthier thoughts of presenting oneself as a white rabbit in his prime of life. (Also features a special guest with two menswear outfits inspired by the artwork.)

#7 SIA Willard Wigan: An interview between Sally and the Rabbit Imitating Art candidate Magpie Harlequin, aka Harley, quickly deteriorates into madness as they fall down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

#8 SIA Maarten Baas: An agile climbing rabbit makes a first ascent on a very atypical museum exhibit with disappointing results but enjoys tricking all but the youngest humans in the gallery with her own "work of art."

#9 SIA Diego Rivera: The true story behind the little-known Tehuantepec myth of the year humans flew when they danced the Sanduga.

#10 SIA Pumpkin: In an unexpected turn of events, the rabbit improving art refused to pose for a photo and menaced the sculpture with a Monty Python foot stamp.

#11 SIA Bellini: A young buck becomes wary when he realizes that he has hopped into a painting with the famous bath-giver John the Baptist.

#12 SIA Earth and Sky: In a history lesson in honor of Labor Day, learn how the revolution took a strange turn when the human workers made a deal with the magical imp/trickster figure Rumplestiltskin, unleashing the logic of a Rabbit of Unusual Size.

#13 SIA Walter Westley Russell: No one knew who the woman was or why the artist painted her...UNTIL NOW! A secret history of the Le Buns cross-ocean race and how the defeat of a horse named Which of the Hare killed a king.

#14 SIA Hilma af Klint: Recent communications with the spirit world reveal the true purpose of the mysterious High Masters in commissioning the artist to create a body of artwork called The Paintings for the Temple.

#15 SIA Autumn: This post advances a radical but assuredly true theory of Bunnicula's heritage, to be proven in the forthcoming article "The Complexly Related Origins of the Vampire Rabbit and the White Pumpkin during the Renaissance."

#16 SIA Cat Symphony: Although the human musician John Cage became famous for his 1952 entirely silent musical work 4'33", the Rabbit Symphony of 1868 demonstrates that this style of music has a much longer history as revealed by the project "An Investigation into the Non-Human Origins of Silent Music (Now With Extra Carrots)."

#17 SIA Derain: The true origins of the "Fauves" art movement is wilder and more beast-filled than anyone had ever imagined! An exposé of the rabbit-refracted color derangement of the village of Collioure, France.

#18 SIA Puppeufee (The Circus): During a revelatory dream, a newly caged rabbit decides that there are worse fates, such as working in the circus under the direction of a deranged and demanding puppet master (also known to humans as: having a job).

Thanks for joining me today for a wrap up of the blog's Rabbits Improving Art for 2025. I'm looking forward to many more style challenges, rabbit photos, and revelations of secret histories in 2026!

And Where Bloggers Live will continue to provide wonderful topics for posts in the coming year - in fact, I think Bettye has already put together a list through the end of 2027!

Next month's topic is Winter's Hidden Charms: My Five Favorite Things about Winter. This is a subject where my answers are quite different living in Minnesota versus my previous lives in the American south.

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers as they share about the best of their blog and wrap up the year 2025:

Bettye at Fashion Schlub

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks

Em at Dust and Doghair

Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

Leslie, blogger emeritus at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After

Iris, always in our hearts, from Iris' Original Ramblings

Have you ever participated in a style challenge? (If not, consider Style Imitating Art in 2026 - you don't need to have a blog to participate.) Do you have a favorite rabbit from 2025? Do you have a favorite rabbit tale from 2025? Do you have a highlight from your life, projects, etc., for 2025 you'd like to share? What are you looking forward to in 2026?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.