Almost, but not quite...

After a period of far too much traveling, I had a few moments to sit down in my craft room the other night - heaven...  I'm working on a project of a series of cards, and finally had a breakthrough and figured out how I wanted to organize the images to make the series cohesive.  More on that soon...

Although I like simple designs that are more 2-D than 3-D, I'm always thinking about moving beyond simple black and white images by injecting pops of color, embossed textures, etc.  I pinned an image to Pinterest the other day that I found on the Hero Arts blog.  I wasn't crazy about the stamped image, but I loved the idea.

tamp an image, mask it, and use a stencil to add a pale background.  Perfect!  Subtle.  Tasteful.  Yes.

As I'm getting my hands dirty with black ink, and pulling out every stencil I own, I come across a recent purchase from the Heirloom show in Allentown in April:   a pre-cut masking template from Stampland made from sturdy cardstock. 

This template is great!  You can use either the positive or negative as a mask.  The paper is sturdy so you can use the mask over and over again.  This seemed to be just what I needed to try out the background idea.

And what's more, I already have the stamp the template matches, which I bought years ago from Silver Crow Creations.

I stamped out my image on a test swatch, and proceed to fit my template over it, only to find...

Yup.  The template and stamp don't match.  I assume that if I had the version of the stamp from Stampland, it would be a perfect fit with the pre-cut mask.  But for now, I guess it's time to get out the Xacto knife.  Or buy the other stamp.  Or both.

Share your product mishaps in the comments!