A new "Hang Out"

Morning all, last night I was reflecting on the fact that this year is 1/2 over, wow and what a year it has been for me on so many levels.  July of this year will mean I have had my Silhouette Cameo for a year, it came with a learning curve I embraced head on.  Then in December I saw that beefing up my photoshop skills would enhance the Cameo even more and took that on.  In pursuing the photoshop knowledge I realized that my progress would be enhanced by joining an Art Journaling Group I found at Scrapbook Graphics, so the end of December I made the 1 year commitment and signed up. Whew! Little did I know what these seemingly small decisions would make in my love of creating, my love of sharing and growing.  So what does all that have to do with my relatively new "Hang Out" projects?  These began last month when I was cleaning the garage and came across a stash of clothes pins and had an idea on how to use them.  I wanted a project that would allow me to share some of the wonderful things I have learned with the Art Journaling Caravan.  In order for a project to stay active on my radar, it has to be able to evolve, it has to lend itself to many mediums, it has to serve a function and still be funny, interesting, inspiring and/or comforting and in particular this project had to simply use words and images.  So far they are standing up to the test.  I love that this one you cannot tell it uses a clothes pin unless you look at it from the back or side, the humming bird hides the pin.  The block is a Spellbinders die and it is sandwiched between 2 pieces of transparency to give it some protection (I am amazed I did not get a flare on this shot, yippee).  The sandwich is held together with two eyelets, one on each side where the ribbon is.  The humming bird is from Marta Van Eck at Deviant Art Scrap.  The coloring on the journaling block is Pan Pastel after blending I do spray it with a matt fixative.

 The bonus is I decided to extract the piece from my photo and it can also be used as an element on one of my digi pages.  The background is a gelli pull on tissue.

This is a side view of the "Hang Out", there is a transparency hangar attached to the back of the block, it slips over the clothes pin before the humming bird is attached to the base of the clothes pin, that means that the jouraling block will never slip off the pin.  So thanks for going the entire post with me, I know it was a little long this morning, I guess what I am saying in short is that you will probably see more of my "Hang Outs", lol, hugs and Happy Hump Day!