Auditioning my next bullet journal

[terriko]

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

I’m loosely auditioning new notebooks to replace my bullet journal. So I pulled out my fountain pens and inked up a few contenders that I hadn’t tried yet and here they are with the ones I’d already sampled:

Description: A set of 5 notebooks open to a pen testing page showing handwritten samples for 5 different pens in different coloured inks. The pens themselves are sitting on the bottom right notebook.

My current bullet journal (the one in the upper right) is a lovely book from Kela Designs. It’s going to run out of pages in a couple of months (maybe sooner if I keep messing around with drawing doggies for doggust). I really love this journal but it’s pretty thick and heavy (160 pages, 160gsm bamboo paper), and I want something thinner that I’ll carry around more and also something that’s closer to 1 year sized for me rather than the 2 years it’s taken to use this one. My desire for a smaller page count has cut me off from a bunch of the more solidly built hardcovers so I’m pretty much just looking at softcover notebooks this round.

Currently the winner is the one with the ivory coloured paper which is from Rhodia (bottom right). Paper’s a bit thicker which makes it closer to my current notebook than the others shown here. While I wonder if the ivory colour is going to go terribly with my stickers, I think I’ll like it for writing and washi tape. It’s also got a slightly rubbery cover that reminds me a lot of the Pentallic notebooks that were my daily travellers for years when I worked at UNM and could pick them up from the campus store. The appeal of this one is a much smaller page count than most A5 dot grid notebooks. It clocks in at 32 sheets / 64 pages, so it’s way thin and I’m not committing myself to 2 years of the same notebook the way I did with my current journal.

The tiny bottom one is a passport-sized one from Goulet that’s meant to fit into the Traveler’s Passport system. I *love* the idea of the system with a leather cover and ever-changing inserts, but the Traveler’s comes in two sizes and I was pretty sure they were “too big” and “too small” but my brain wouldn’t let go of the idea of trying it out. Thankfully the refill notebooks are pretty cheap so I could try it out without actually buying a cover. The paper is nice, but the size is definitely no good for my bullet journal needs. I’d been thinking about it as a travel journal option but holding it in my hands (not even writing in it!) I took a different notebook on my last trip so… it’s probably not a winner for me right now. I’ll likely toss this tiny one into my purse to see if I use it, and I might try the larger size at a future date because I really like the idea of being able to get some pre-printed calendar notebooks, but I may have to accept that while the concept is good they just don’t have quite the right dimensions for me.

Middle left is my latest travel notebook from Field Notes that beat out the passport to get taken on my last trip. It’s big enough that I could work out knitting charts in it, but I didn’t love it with fountain pens and wound up using pencil and gel pen. Since both of those are less potentially risky for travel anyhow, I’ll likely keep it as my travel companion. But it’s not making the cut for bullet journal replacement outside of that.

Upper left is from Clairefontaine. I got this one to see if I liked the paper, and I do! I also was surprised by how much I liked the wider lines for writing, as they work really well with my thicker fountain pens. I also tried sticking it in an a5 ghost whale pouch (from Tom Bihn) and carrying it around in my knitting bag and found that it was a winner for weight and size. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of hooked on the dot grid thing over the past year and some of my habits and tracking rely on it, so after trying it out for a while I decided to buy the Rhodia notebook that’s likely the winner. But I really like this notebook and I’ll find another use for it!

Description: A set of 5 notebooks closed so you can see the covers. In the upper right there is a thick green A5 one from Kela Designs with a corgi on it. Lower right is a Rhodia A5 softcover in blue. Bottom middle is a smaller brown passport sized one from Goulet pens. On the lower left is a black Field Notes one, mostly A5 slzed but smaller than the other 4. On the upper left is a Clairefontaine notebook with a cyanotype illustration on it, also a5 size. There is a test tube sitting on top of it to help you see how much thinner it is than the green notebook beside it; it’s probably more than 1cm thinner.

I noticed at Powell’s that the Leuchtturm 1917 also comes in a smaller softcover with a smaller page count, so I may try that out in future. Honestly, I might have impulse bought it if they’d had it in a colour other than black. But by the time I got home and looked up what other colours were available, I convinced myself that I should start with the Rhodia that I already bought, so I’m trying to force myself to wait until I actually need a replacement (or they go on sale, I guess?).

Also, look at me with those fountain pens! I went from one pen that I found in a drawer to 5 (although one is a disposable one, and the other 3 are relatively cheap). Thankfully my current notebook has nice enough paper to accommodate me in this journey into fountain pens and pretty inks. I’m having a lot of fun!