If you follow bullet journaling on any social media you are likely familiar with Zebra Mildliners. I admit my FOMO was so strong on these that when I saw a set at Target priced well above my budget I almost put everything in my cart back to spend $20 on a handful of not-highlighters.

I’ll be blunt, the Mildliner is a dual-tipped marker. It’s a really nice one, but at the end of the day, it is a marker. The ink is translucent enough that you can see any writing you are highlighting.

The core point of the Mildliner is that they aren’t highlighter bright. The colors are muted and mild on the page. The shades do pop off the page but function as almost any marker might. I picked up 3 Mildliners in the loose stock at Michael’s. At $1.99 each or more in a set these are pretty pricey little markers. Loose with a coupon at Michael’s brings these into an affordable price range.

In terms of performance, I find both tips suitably sturdy. I’ve only used mine for a few days but they haven’t crushed or deformed in my use. I don’t generally have a problem with mushing chisel tips but I do with bullet tips. But the bullet tips have stayed at a nice fine point. I have found that I quite enjoy the bullet tip for making a few notes or underlining notes in my pocket notebook. The size of these is nice too, it is close enough to a regular pen that it will fit into a regular pencil case, so you don’t need to find an extra long case, I’m looking at YOU Tombow Dual Tip Brush Markers!

I’m biased, but I picked up 3 colors I knew I would like and use, so I like the colors and they work well for how I use highlighters. Which is to say, that I use highlighters for minor emphasis in my notes- underlining some of my text or by circling notes. I also use them in my bullet journal to denote weekends and other important events. I need to figure out how I’m going to use mine in my “side-hustle bullet journal” (SHBJ) and what I’m going to denote with them.

In use, they smear with the same inks, pencils, and pens as any other highlighter. So expect that if you use waterbased inks or fountain pens that you’ll get smearing. IF you want to use pencil stick to HB or F grades for less smear, those 2b and Blackwings are going to get graphite all over the place.

Overall I think that the Mildliner performs wonderfully and the colors are great. They are just different enough that finding these shades in another brand of marker is going to be a pain in the rear. Frankly, any chisel tip or bullet tip marker will perform similarly, but finding a chisel tip marker that is in a compact package with these colors is going to be difficult. The closest you’ll get to these shades is the Tombow Dual Tip Brush Pen. But that has a brush tip which many will find hard to control, though is great for the same purposes as the Mildliner.

I like these, but I also guaranteed my like by purchasing only the 3 colors I knew I’d use in my bullet journal or in my lifelong learning quest. The best place to purchase these is at Jetpens.  Their prices are the best online and their sets are at the best price I’ve seen. You can also get them at Michael’s from the singles display at the register. Which is the best price I’ve seen in person. I’ve seen the 15-color set at Target during BTS but not since.

I reviewed the standard Story Supply Company (SSC) pocket notebook and pencils over here. Plus I’ve picked up and reviewed their collab with CW Pencil Enterprise called “the Pencil Pusher” over here. They began as a Kickstarter and have evolved into a small but growing company that makes their own notebooks in a small shop in York, Pennsylvania. I love this little company.

There is a lot to love about this company. First, their LE game is on point, their summer 2018 edition “SMR” is a gorgeous series of orange and yellow shades across the cover of a notebook. It perfectly evoked the hot August sun.  

The Fall 2018 LE, “Morning” is muted and gorgeous. I don’t know how many of you have needed to get up super early in the morning in the fall and happened to look out across a field or lake. Watching the fog lift and the changes in temperature occur is really gorgeous, and the Story Supply team captured that feeling in this cover. It’s a grey to black gradient but done a little differently to get that fog like feel. I love it. Inside is a lighter grey version of the gradient plus some printing.

The cover stock is thick and beefy, it’s some of the thickest cover stock available in the pocket notebook game and it is the one to beat. The thick cover stock makes this a great notebook to use for notes on the go-  the sturdiness of the covers means you can actually write in hand without a great deal of bending.

Inside the covers are 48-pages of thick creamy paper. It’s smooth but toothy enough that all my pencils respond well on its surface. Fountain pens do pretty well on this paper as well. It’s thick so there isn’t a great deal of show through. I had no feathering or bleed through, but the largest nib I used was a medium and most of my inks are well behaved. Rubber stamps do well on this smooth but toothy paper.

Overall, the SSC notebooks are top notch and are just amazing to use. At $11.99 their pricing is standard for materials that are anything but. The combination of quality and durability can’t be beaten. You could buy another brand but why? If you want to test them out without buying an LE their regular notebooks are $10, but they also have sales on older editions for $10 as well.

SSC donates notebook and pencil sets to schools in need. You buy a pack of notebooks and a kid gets a notebook and pencil set of their own.

The Pilot Precise V5 has been around since the dawn of my stationery awakening and is a favorite of mine. I like it for just about every task- writing, notes, sketching and doodles. It is a great pen.

Until I saw these on the shelf I’ve always bought the capped version. I don’t know if I simply wasn’t aware of the retractable version or if it wasn’t available. Regardless, I have them now and I’m never going back.

The design of the pen is simple and parts of it hearken back to the capped version- the grooves in the nose and swirly silver on the color, and translucent colored plastic. The similarities end there. The rubberized grip has DX-like divots. THe knock reminds me of the Signo 207. It has a long drive down to extend the tip and click into place. It does have a satisfying click noise. The clip is a futuristic wrap around that clips tightly to the placket of my shirt or a notebook. It wiggles from side to side and feels loose when it’s not clipped to anything. It’s not, it has a sloppy feel.

Overall the Precise V5 RT is a great update to the capped version of the pen. You won’t lose a cap and the ink is fabulous. It does respond and feels more like gel ink than liquid ink. I’m okay with that. Anyway, you can get these on Amazon for around $2/pen. There are entire tubs of 48 of these pens- black and multi colors for around $55! They are also available in just about any store from Target to Walmart to Staples to the local grocery chain.

Pen+Gear might be Walmart’s house brand but it has contained some surprising quality. I snagged the Pen+Gear Gel Stick Pens (GSP) n a whim from the clearance section post Back-to-School season. Cost in clearance was around 50 cents. Regular price is a few dollars. They are made in China.

In the package are eight 0.7mm pens. Each pen has a grippy rubber grip with circular divots to improve the grip. The tip at the working end is metal. The tip unscrews to reveal a pretty standard stick pen gel refill. Each refill has a different amount of ink. You can see the differences in the images of the package. The refill doesn’t last very long. It took less than a half week for me to blow through one at my day job.

The ink itself is nicely dark, doesn’t grey out in the middle, and has really nice flow. Some of my pens were perfectly wonderfully smooth, others were scratchy and felt gross on all paper. The ink seems moderately waterproof. I do not know if it is lightfast. I have not tested it.

The cap snaps closed securely and with a nice click. It posts in the same manner. All of it is nicely secure.

You might recognize the design from several sources- the design is a direct rip off of the Uniball Signo DX stick gel pen. It also looks like the Staples Stick Gel pens, which I suspect are made by Uniball. Frankly the Pen+Gear GSP looks as though Walmart passed a Signo DX and said, “Scan this, but change everything just enough so we don’t get sued.”

Honestly, while the Pen+Gear pencils and notebooks are a steal these aren’t. You have to find the pens that work smoothly and contend with scratchy tips to do so. Even if you need a cheap waterproof sketcher you can usually walk into any store (here in the US) and pick up a 2 or 3-pack of Uniball Signo in black for not much more and have almost guaranteed smoothness and success. The Pen+Gear GSP is a pass from me.

The Grand is a refillable pen body made for Zebra’s Sarasa gel ink refills. It will hold almost any gel ink refill- from Pentel to Pilot to Uniball.

The Grand is available in 5 colors, black, navy silver, copper, and gold. The clip on all colors is chrome. The lower half of the pen is metal cased in a thick layer of glossy metallic lacquer. The top half holds the clip and a translucent window. It could be argued that the window is to view the ink level but it is far too high to tell you when the ink is low, and thus useless, but looks nice.

Overall, I find the Grand quite comfortable. It’s narrower than the Pentel Alloy and heavier. The weight is toward the working end and as a result the balance feels good to me. The glossy lacquer is going to be slippery for folks with sweaty hands, but works great for me. The clip is sturdy and grabs onto my lapel and holds on. The Grand has made it as a DayJob go to pen because the clip is fabulous.

I picked up mine in the clearance section of my local Walgreens for… 75 cents. They only had the copper (aka Rose Gold?) color which is really a dull metallic orange-pink. At 75 cents it was cheaper than a regular Sarasa. Regular price is about $11 almost everywhere. IF you don’t like the Sarasa refills you can get the Sarasa Clip refills via Jetpens, ranging from about 75 cents each to $2 a refill. You can also buy boxes of Pentel or Uniball refills on Amazon. Essentially, you have options of refilling this pen body.