Rudolph Day Challenge # March 2022

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.

For my second card I chose a very different theme, this time using some more Lidls card with snowmen and pine trees printed on it, a panel of bokeh paper and my absolutely favourite snowman stamp (Fun stamps). I cut him out with a frame die that was bought with a winter scene stamp by Flourishes. I added some colour to his hat and scarf and white perfect pearls to the pom-pom. As I like a bit of sparkle on Christmas cards I used glitter glue to highlight the snow and added a silver sentiment and a few silver snowflakes.

I think my efforts in the Silhouete software paid off, and I can see this file has the potential to make many more cards. So these two will now be linked up to the Rudolph day Challenge for March over on Scrappy Mo's blog.