Frank Garcia's Memory Hardware Albums make it so easy to create beautiful mini albums!

I love Memory Hardware Albums because the base of the album is already created for you. All you have to do is fill it with pretty papers, ephemera and journaling cards! 

There are a ton of different options on the Prima Marketing retail site (use code adrienne15 for 15% off your order)! For this album, I chose the 6.5 inch square Journal Album. I love the little flap that comes over on the right side of the album that magnets it closed. 

I always like to stuff my albums pretty full. Combined with the lace I added to the front cover, the magnets have a tough time holding the album closed on their own. Oops! I'm still getting the hang of the right balance of embellishments, but that doesn't mean this album was ruined! In fact, it gives me an excuse to finally use one of the Victorian Hand Clips I've had forever. While I do love using these clips as photography props, this time, it's not a prop!

So let's talk about some of the things I did in this mini album and some of my advice for you. I started by decorating the cover. The cover is the one place where you can pile your embellishments a bit higher so I took advantage of that. 

I used the Bohemian Heart collection to make this mini album. I used some of the 12x12 papers to cover the outside this album. Before gluing on the piece for the front left panel, I sewed on some of the white lace from the Postcards from Paradise collection. 

I then glued all of my embellishments to the right side flap. I used ephemera, fussy cut ephemera, flowers and leaves that I die cut from one of the papers from the collection. I tucked in lace and some threads then added some Memory Hardware Pearls to the top flowers. 

For the inside, I added a lot of pockets to hold journaling cards from the Bohemian Heart collection. To create pockets, I sewed paper together before gluing the base paper into the album. 

I also a flip to one page, as well as a shaker element to another page, sewing 3 channels into the paper and plastic packaging that held the sequins. 

Several of the pages I just let the papers really shine as there is so much detail designed into them. A few got a frame or a matte of paper to hold a future photo.

So let's talk about what went well and what I would do differently next time. First, I might save decorating the cover of the album until the very end. While it wasn't difficult to decorate the inside of the album, I do think I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally messing up the outside while pressing papers and adhesive on to internal pages. 

The other thing I would do differently is put less on some of the internal pages. Less is more in this case. You only have so much clearance in between each page. Chipboard stickers, lace and foam adhesive all take up room and when you have two things that are thicker directly across from one another, it could make it too thick. 

That was something I learned while making this mini. You can tell that I did put less on the pages in the second half of the album. I would definitely say that 1 mm thick foam adhesive is definitely better than 2 or 3 mm thick foam adhesive!

I hope that you enjoyed this little look through my latest mini album for Prima using a Frank Garcia Memory Hardware Album. I plan on doing more albums like this as well as some other album formats. Let me know in the comment section below if you'd like to see me use Prima collections to create a pocket page album! 

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Below are products that I used for this project.

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Enjoy 15% off your order on the Prima Retail site when you use code adrienne15.

Below are products that I used for this project.