Rudolph nearly caught me out this month as I had not prepared my post, but I have made some cards so here they are. Two cards using the same idea, but very different elements.
I happened to see a card I liked on the net with a braided spine, so I investigated how it was made and it used the old idea of lattice cuts. I did some of these maybe twenty years ago, I think using a stencil for the cuts. They were cut, folded and tucked in, to form a flat ornamental strip along the edge of a card. But for these cards, the cuts were made centrally along the spin of the card, folded and tucked, and then folded in half to make the card with a braided spine.
Of course, my hands not being very nimble these days, I try to do most of my card cutting with my Silhouette Cameo machine, but it took me a long time to make a cutting file that just cut slits. (Normally it would cut along both sides of my lines to make wider slits and I didn't want that). But after a lot of fiddling around I finally had my file, so now of course, I can use it whenever I want to, and it is just effective for cards for different occasions.
For my first card I used blue printed card from Lilds which was white on the back. Then I added some embossed pearl blue card, and used a Memory box die to cut the teardrop nativity scene from gold mirri-card, and cutting it a second time from blue paper to infill the design. I finished it with a die-cut sentiment in gold and some peel-off star strings.
