Guest Designer | Heba Alsibai

We're thrilled to have the lovely and talented Heba Alsiabi as one of our guest designers this month and are excited to get to know her better today! Be sure to follow Heba here at Studio Calico. 

Hi, everyone! My name is Heba Alsibai and I’m a wife to a wonderful husband and a mother to two teenagers. Yup, I said two teenagers! They definitely keep me busy, but they also give me a lot of great memories to document. My husband and I own a small medical supply company. He does all the traveling and I make sure everything is running smoothly at work and with the kids. One of the best things about my job is I get to work from home. If you’re wondering if I get to wear my pajamas all day, the answer is YES!! 

In my spare time, I like to read, crochet, and help out with my sons marching band—GO HAWKS! I love listening to 90’s alternative, indie rock, and classical music. I played the piano since I was a little girl and grew up thinking I would be the next Tori Amos (LOL!). That definitely didn’t happen but I ended up being a mother to some really awesome kids.

I’m originally from the Middle East; to be specific, my parents are from Palestine. They moved to the United States to give my siblings and me a better life. When they moved to the United States, they didn’t speak a word of English, but they were fearless and brave. I hope my children will have that same courage and bravery in everything they do. 

I grew up in a very artistic family. My mother had a little ceramic factory where she created and sold all her handmade ceramics. She always pushed my siblings and me to find our artistic gene. Mine was always music until 2006 when I moved with my husband and kids to Dubai and meet my next door neighbor who was a scrapbooker. Once I looked through her beautiful scrapbook albums, I was hooked. I started my scrapbooking adventure creating 12" x 12" layouts, and in 2011, I found Project Life® and it changed my life. 

That’s also around the same time I found Studio Calico. I’ve been a subscriber to Studio Calico’s Documenter Kit since 2012 and am now a subscriber to the Traveler’s Notebook Kit. These kits are perfect for me. They come with everything I need to create beautiful spreads in no time. 

I’m currently on three design teams: Kelly Purkey, Feed Your Craft, and Color Cast Design. These teams give me some wonderful products to create with, whether it’s in my pocket pages, mini albums, or my traveler’s notebooks. I share a lot of my projects and layouts on my YouTube channel (My Little Journal) or on Instagram (@hebaalsibai) where you can see my process videos and the stories behind each layout. 

Me, Myself & I – My sister works as an English teacher overseas, and every summer, she flies home and spends the summer with us. When my sister and niece are home for the summer, I like to take pictures of my niece while she’s not looking. I love to capture the world through her eyes. I really loved this blue and black patterned paper with the heart in the center. I felt like it would work perfectly with my pictures. I ended up choosing three of my favorite pictures for this spread. Keeping the pictures small gave me space to add some of the die-cuts and transparency stickers as layers to my pictures. I really loved the tag and knew I could use it as an embellishment. So I stamped three tags with black ink, added some twine, and tucked them behind each picture. To finish off my spread, I stamped "Seeker Of Everyday Magic" on the opposite page and called my spread done.

Seeker Of Everyday Magic – This spread was inspired by the beautiful floral patterned paper. I kept it simple because I really didn’t want to cover that beautiful pattern. Whenever I have a picture that doesn’t match my spread, I change it to black and white. This is a picture of my daughter at the pool, and the blue from the pool definitely didn’t match my paper. So changing my picture to black and white really made putting this spread together easier. I used the die-cuts to highlight the picture and add more color to the right side of my spread. The black translucent stickers also helped bring in the black from the patterned paper. I ended up stamping "Seeker Of Everyday Magic" as my title, then called my spread done. 

See more from Heba:

YouTube

Instagram