A Gem of a Challenge - photo inspiration

This week at A Gem of a Challenge it's the lovely Gemma's turn to host again, and she's given us a photo to use for inspiration... those of you who are regulars to my blog will know I struggle with these just a bit lol!  I'd also like to say congrats and welcome to our new Pink Gem teamies who have been announced on the blog today - so pleased for you all, and looking forward to 'working' with you :o)

Here's the inspiration photo...

And here's what I made...

I've used one of the adorable new Jodie images - this is Cartwheel Jodie, isn't she fab?  I coloured her with promarkers and flexmarkers and cut her out using my new favourite Stampin' Up framelits dies - the yellow mat was made by drawing around the die and then cutting it out, as I find with most of these fancy shapes the jump between sizes is too big for matting, for me anyway!  A bit of inky edging hides any little cutting imperfections ;o)

The card base is the front piece of a Craftwork Cards 'on the edge elegant' card blank, scored and folded in half.  The papers are from a Papermania pad, and I hand stitched the main piece with some yellow Bazzill thread.  The sentiment is LOTV, butterfly was punched using a Kars punch and the spotty flowers were punched using an x-cut punch.  Pearls and card candy from my stash and the yellow flower is Prima - meadowlark.

I'm entering my card for the challenge at I Love Promarkers, which is to use die cuts.

I don't feel quite so irritable about the heat today, but that's probably because I've not really needed to do too much in it so far... hubby wants to drag me to the park later and he's doing the man thing - talking about BBQs lol!  He's taken Dex to his mum's this morning, and as we don't actually own a BBQ I'm half expecting him to come home with one... my hubby, lovely as he is, is WAY too accident prone to be in charge of a BBQ!

Hope you all have a lovely weekend, whatever you're up to :o)