Introducing our July Guest Designer - Lydia Fiedler

We so very excited to be welcoming Lydia Fiedler to the blog today as our July guest designer. She really almost doesn't need an introduction as she's a very familiar face in the industry, but here's a little more about her:

My name is Lydia Fiedler, and I live in Austin, Texas with my husband and two tiny feline overlords, Maddie and Splotchy. I'm employed full time as the Community Manager of Splitcoaststampers, and also do lots of freelance work in social media and marketing. I've been stamping since my early teen years, and still find more wonder and delight in paper arts every day. It's a joy to be a part of such a creative industry. I describe my style as CAQ - clean and quirky - and when I'm creating, I usually have a small black cat perched on my shoulders, and a true crime podcast playing. My favorite thing about papercrafting is that I believe it allows me to serve others in that small, magical way that only sending a handmade card to someone can do. I blog at www.understandblue.blogspot.com and I'm understandblue on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.

We know you're going to love seeing what Lydia creates this month.  Here she is with all the details about this week's card:

Hey everyone! I'm thrilled to be a guest of Neat & Tangled this month. I met Danielle a few years ago, and have an immense amount of respect and affection for her, so her amazing stamps and dies are really just a bonus on top of our friendship. She's seriously an awesome person.

Anyway - let's talk about today's card. A lot of people when they create art, they listen to music, or stream their fave Netflix shows. I can't do that. Visual content and music are very distracting for me for some reason, but I have found that audiobooks and podcasts are perfect. I can concentrate on the story and also they keep me from overthinking my projects because I am sort of engrossed in the story.

My favorite genre is non-fiction, especially true crime, and I love the True Crime Sweden podcast, because the host gives a fun fact about Sweden at the end of every episode. A recent episode's fun fact was the Dala Horse, which I used on my card today. I fell in love with these little horses as a child - my next door neighbor was my pastor, and he was Norwegian, and had all sorts of Scandinavian art in his home, included Dala horses. 

I love Scandanavian design in general, and these little horses epitomize the best of that design. I love the clean lines of this stamp & die, so I kept it simple with Copic coloring and a white gel pen. I used the Lucky Stars die to add some sparkle.  The sentiment is from the Magnolia set.

I hope you have a great weekend! If you want to see my favorite podcasts, I have them all listed here.