Huggie Card - A Tutorial

Happy Saturday everyone, I do hope everyone will have a great weekend. Full sun, some cool breezes and lots of leisure time. I promised I would do a tutorial for those of you that had questions about my Huggie cards and especially those who do not have or did not want to use design studio. I kept my example as simple as possible so as not to interfere with the purpose of the tutorial. There are so many ways this could be done and if you are interested in doing some, take a few of my suggestions or all of them but most of all let your creative process take hold in this and make it yours. My first Huggie card was done with Design Studio "Alice was Here", see below, if you want to do the shapes for your Huggie, i.e. the cup and table top you are going to have to do it with Design Studio, pretty much no other way. The below technique will give you the same feel though and you do not have to use Design Studio to achieve it.

These are the essential ingredients, your card blank, mine is 5"X5" but it can be any size you desire, just remember that you will have to adjust the size of the huggie when you change your card size. A 1" X 11" strip of double sided cardstock and your embellishment. You will notch the strip 5" in at both ends, one notch at the top to the middle and one notch at the bottom to the middle. I then open one of the notches up a little with a pair of scissors to make it easier to close. Do not open up both notches as it will tend to pop open. Then score left and right at 3 1/4". Your card blank, when I created the card in Design Studio I had a problem with the folding of the pieces over the top, it looked bumpy because they are folding over 2 pieces of card stock, so what I did was create my card using a 5" square and a 4 7/8" square, the 4 7/8" square being the top that folds over, and this solved my problem and also gave my card some interesting dimension about 1/8" boarder on the sides and a nice peek a boo bottom to use decorative scissors or a boarder punch on. If you want the peek a boo bottom score your card top at 4 3/4".
Now choose your embellishment and begin putting your card together.

This is a close up of the enlarged notch, I did with scissors.

I embossed the front with the new Swirl Cuttlebug folder and used Fiskar Decorative scissors for the bottom boarder. This is how the Huggie looks before embellished. Now here is an interesting feature, you can use the Huggie in several ways, you can permanently attach it to the back with adhesive or you can use it as a slip, if you really want to get artistic you can notch the back 3 or 4 times and weave it through the back, giving the back some added dimension and style but you will need to cut a block for the inside of the card if you choose this way, to cover up the notches.
I choose to do one of the Cuttlebug butterflies as my embellishment, I cut it twice, embossed one of the butterflies with the same folder as I did the front, the other butterfly is just plain, I fold up the wings of the embossed butterfly and adhere just the body to the plain the butterfly, this gives your butterfly the feel of flight. When you are adhering the embellishment to your Huggie keep in mind you do not want to glue your notches together, so you are going to adhere it just to the outer side of the notch.
this is the first opening.
This is the second opening of the Huggie card. These cards lend themselves beautifully to initial cards so I added the initials of one of my dear friends. The card is done. Thinking ahead a little these would make wonderful Christmas cards. Enjoy the process. Hugs