Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Great Expectations Sneak Preview and Chance To Win

Welcome to the sneak preview of one of the new stamp sets being released on Friday from Verve Visual, GREAT EXPECTATIONS. This set contains 13 sentiments that are perfect for encouraging someone to do their best or congratulating someone on a job well done. Today you will see samples from five of the Design Team members using the GREAT EXPECTATIONS set. Be sure to check back tomorrow when the rest of the crew shows off their incredible project with the other set that is being released.

From Carole Burrage:

Last week I saw Amy Rysavy's awesome
Coaster Picture Frame tutorial, and a light bulb came on over my head: the "Superstar" sentiment from the new Great Expectations set would make a terrific frame around my own little Superstar, my son, Truman. A couple of lightweight coasters, a little designer paper, some sparkly stars and now I have a cute frame of Truman's latest Basketball photo. I'm going to whip up a couple of these for the Grandparents, too -- these will make great additions to upcoming Mother's & Father's Day presents!
From Laura Fredrickson:
Great Expectations has quickly become my favorite sentiment set. It just says "Congratulations" in so many expressive and fun ways. For this card I chose the sentiment, "Wishing you Success beyond your wildest expectations". What a wonderful wish for someone about to take the next step in living their dreams. For my card I wanted drama, so I chose black, and worked with Seeing Stars. I stamped a group of stars randomly in Versamark, then embossed in gold, then stamped another group and embossed in silver. The black is then layered on brushed gold and silver cardstock. Three gold embossed vellum stars frame the sentiment panel, which is adorned with silver star eyelets. The sentiment panel is popped up on dimensionals to really make it stand out.

From Laurie Schmidlin:
When I first saw Great Expectations, my mind started racing with ideas! Nobody does sentiments like Verve!! These sentiments really lend themselves to fun and unique projects! For this project, I chose the "Big Bucks, no whammies!" sentiment to create a money holder. I wanted my card to be gender neutral, so I chose this brightly colored polka dot paper (by S.E.I.) and pulled my colors (Black, Wild Wasabi, & Blue Bayou) from it. For accents, I cut out/embossed some circles using my circle Nestabilities and then added some stars from the Seeing Stars set.
For the inside, I stamped Happy Birthday from the Happy Thoughts set, added some more circles, a star, Black grosgrain ribbon (secured with two black eyelets), some piercings....& of course some money! :-)



From Jen del Muro:
When driving home from the grocery store the car in front of me had an Army bumper sticker. I've seen the same sticker 100 times, but for some reason it stuck with me this time. When I sat down in my studio I recalled the sticker and used it as my inspiration point to make a card that would be appropriate to send to someone in the Army, or any of the Armed Forces. I love that this set has a great variety of sentiments. I would consider this a more "serious" card, but as you can see from the other samples, there are some great light hearted sentiments as well.


From Susan Liles:

To Infinity and Beyond!!! If this sentiment doesn't get you thinking Buzz Lightyear and Woody from the movie, Toy Story, I don't know what will! At least that's what it did for me, but then again, I have little ones underfoot all the time and they love to watch that movie (over and over I might add!). It's actually one of my favorites, too! So I just HAD to make a card using that sentiment from the new Verve Visual set, Great Expectations, that carried along the theme of the show. Because I have no rocket ship stamps or anything "outer space", I had to come up with a paper-pieced rocket ship. Then I wanted a little window on it, and who better to fly the thing than this little cowboy that I stamped and colored with my Prisma Markers to look like Woody. I used my CM circle punches to create the open window and then put a transparency circle under it for the "glass". The flames were so fun to make! I used my Fancy Florals set also from Verve and just cut them (mostly in half) to make a "layered flame" that would surely rocket him to Infinity and Beyond! I decided I needed a few stars in the galaxy, so I pulled out my Verve Seeing Stars set and just added a couple and filled them in with Stardust Stickles, along with some of the flames and the tip of the rocket. The Spots and Dots Cuttlebug Folder made great "moon craters" as well, using the reverse side of the embossed blue piece. The ribbon was a fun finishing touch! Great Expectations---it's lightyears above the rest and can take you, too, To INFINITY and BEYOND!!



**Want to be the proud owner of this new set? All you need to do is leave a comment on this post by 10PM
MT (midnight ET) on April 24. Then be sure to check back on April 25, when we’ll announce the lucky winner and reveal the new Verve sets!**