2023: My Favorite Bujo Pens
Planning my life with one tool at a time!
Hello, my friends! It’s been a little while! I hope you are all enjoying your spring!
Down here in Texas the temps are warming up to the 90s regularly, which means that summer is right around the corner. Personally, I’m not a fan of the dry and high temps in North Texas during summer, so I can’t wait to move past this next season and then get right into fall!
In today's post, I’d like to talk about pens. Pens are a long-time collector item for me. I have loved pens all my life. I still have the first fountain pen my husband gave me many years ago.
There was a period of time when I was obsessed with fountain pens and couldn’t get enough of them. I was obsessively purchasing pens in every color of my once-favorite brand, TWSBI. A few years ago, I sold most of them. Now I have just a handful…and a ton of ink for them. 😂
As much as I once loved them, they are not part of my current pen lineup. Most of this has to do with the kinds of planners and paper I’m using today. I may go back to fountain pens in the future, but it’s not something I plan on for the rest of 2023.
There are 3 types of pens I use in my 2023 daily planning routine:
Pentel Energel Clena
Uni Jetstream
Zebra Sarasa
I have each one of these in duplicate, with plenty of backup refill inks in a variety of colors, and they are all at least 0.5mm in nib size.
In line with my green nature, I do my best to reuse pens and refill them instead of throwing them out and replacing them with new ones. What I found in my journey is most pen companies allow you to replace the ink. You might need to do an online search to figure out how, but it’s generally possible.
If you’ve ever ordered from my Etsy shop, you’ve noticed I include handwritten notes in every order. I exclusively use one of my Energel Clenas for that purpose. The ink is very wet, very dark, and just rolls over my cardstock paper beautifully. You may also notice the ink is smudged in my notes from time to time. 😂 Sometimes I handwrite the note right before inserting it into my Etsy packages, so I forget to let the ink dry.
The Uni Jetstream is used exclusively in my Hobonichi cousin, which is the daily planner that sits on my desk. Also a smooth writer, the ink isn’t as wet as the Energel Clena. However, it’s such a pleasure to write with that pen on Tomoe River Paper. In addition, you’ll notice in the picture above that this pen has a cushioned grip built into it. Since I do my daily journaling in the Hobonichi daily pages, I need that grip to avoid tiring out. Pro tip: I’ve tried so many cushioned grips in my lifetime. This one is the absolute best. It’s great for people who grip their pens firmly. I have calluses on my fingers from so many decades of writing by hand — this pen has stopped me from creating new ones.
My Zebra Sarasa is my EDC bujo planner pen. I have this pen in almost every color of the “vintage” line and even upgraded to a few of their nice-looking vintage color metal pens in my favorite ink colors. The ink is super wet, fast drying, and has nice, contrasting colors. I absolutely adore the vintage color lineup. My favorite ink colors there are dark gray, camel yellow, and cassis black (which is a magenta color). The a6 Leuchtturm dot notebook is my EDC planner. However, I use additional of these notebooks for my reading tracker and other one-off notebooks. Therefore, I’ve supplied one Zebra Sarasa for each of these notebooks (and fasten them to the notebook using an Oli magnetic clip).
Here’s a little swatch of each of my favorite 2023 pens on Stalogy notebook paper:
I would love to say I’m the type of person who sticks to only one type of pen forever, but I get easily distracted by new products. I want to try them all!
What types of pens do you use in your planners and notebooks?