Stretching my Stamps!

Hey Everyone!
I've had an incredibly productive day today and figured I'd share what I've made. So there are 2 cards in this post again :)

Lately I've been in a little bit of a crafty rut and I've been trying to figure out why. One of the things that keeps popping into my mind is the fact that I've used all the stamps that I have so many times that the creative ideas for them seem to be all gone...so I have been trying to challenge myself to see if I can come up with new ways to use them until I can get some money together to buy new stuff :)

This is a super cute card that worked out so perfectly for this "stretching" of my stamps:

How cute is that! I combined 2 stamp sets to make this little sweetie: In My Heart from Mama Elephant and Critters in Costume from Lawn Fawn.

I first stamped the pumpkin from the Lawn Fawn set, masking off the little rabbit inside. Then masked the pumpkin and stamped this cute little girl so she's popping up out of the pumpkin! I love it!! The little witches hat is from the cat in the Lawn Fawn set.

The circle around her is all one layer, but I cut out part of the circle up to where the banner is and put some dimension tape on the back so it stamps up. Then I did some inking with my distress inks. I silver embossed a few stars in the sky from the Hero Arts Shoot for the Moon set and added the fun Boo sentiment on vellum from the Lawn Fawn set. I love how this turned out and really got me excited to use my stamps in more creative ways.

I'd like to enter this pumpkin cutie into the following challenges:
2 Cute Ink #116-Halloween
A Blog Named Hero #53-Stretch Your Stamps
Delightful Challenge-Delightfully Frightful
Mama Elephant & Me-Anything Goes
The Challenge #16

This next card was a little frustrating but so worth all the fuss:

For this card, I used a Simon Says Stamp set called Flower Friend. It's a great set full of adorable little flower stamps, but I've used those flower stamps so many times...I needed a change. So I took the cute little scallop border in the set and bent it around into a circle...several times because it kept popping back off my block.. The stamp was actually a little too short for the size flower I wanted, so I just stamped a few of the scallops by themselves to finish the circle.

So awesome! I used some outline and solid circles from the Lots of Dots set to fill in the centers.
Then stamped and white heat embossed my sentiment onto vellum. The sentiment is from the Winnie & Walter set The Big The Bold & The Happy. I love this set because even though it doesn't always have the words I want to use, I can always find ways to piece them together to work. Like the word "you're"...that isn't in the set, but I was able to mask off around an "r" and an "e" to get the word. I love that!

I'd like to enter this flower card into the following challenges:
Fusion Card Challenge

MilkCoffee-Lots of Layers
Winnie & Walter-Unexpected Stamping

While I was taking these pics, I turned to my desk and snapped a pic for the Winnie & Walter Craftie challenge. This is how I left it...there are about 4 projects in the works on that desk and it's quite messy...

This is just my work desk. To the left I have my ribbon shelf and a huge cabinet that holds a lot of my supplies, and to the right is my computer, paper, and Silhouette.

So thanks for sticking around to read this whole post! A bit long but I really wanted to share these :) <3