Best Bullet Journal Supplies of 2026

Dusty rose, sage, mustard, soft grey — the Mildliner palette is built for putting color behind your writing rather than over it. The soft, translucent ink is why these turn up in so many bullet journals: a highlighted date stays readable, and a blocked-out weekend reads as a block of color rather than a neon stripe across the page.

Each pen has two ends: a chisel that covers anywhere from 1mm to 4mm depending on how you hold it, and a fine bullet tip for underlining or writing a small label. We got more use out of the bullet tip than expected, for headings and one-word emphasis where the chisel would be too broad. The pigment ink is water resistant, so once a layer is dry you can go over it again without the first color lifting — useful when two categories overlap in the same bar chart.

Bleed-through is the caveat, and it depends on your paper rather than the pen: on heavier journal stock the color sits on top, while on thin Bible-style paper you will see a shadow of the shape from the back. They can also pick up gel ink that is not fully dry, so highlight after your writing has had a moment rather than straight after. On the paper most bullet journals use, neither of those will slow you down.

Fourteen colors and no caps to lose. The retractable body sounds like a small convenience until you are three colors into a color-coded week: we ended up clicking between colors mid-line rather than hunting for the cap that rolled under the notebook, and that is the sort of thing that decides whether a spread gets finished or abandoned until Sunday.

The gel writes wetter than a fineliner at 0.7mm, so the fast-drying claim is doing real work here. It holds up: on standard journal paper the line is dry enough to close the book on after a beat, and it does not smear under a resting hand. The line is medium-broad, though, so this is a writing pen rather than a labelling pen — for small capitals inside a weekly spread you want something closer to 0.3mm.

The gamble is per pen. Consistency across a set is uneven, so a dud out of the box is a real possibility: open the whole set when it arrives and scribble with each one while you can still exchange it. The ones that work are smooth, generously inked and pleasant in the hand, with a grip that wraps the entire barrel — which stops mattering to nobody by the third page of a long list.

Twenty-two sheets, sorted by month: a page for January, a page for February, and so on, plus all-purpose sheets that work whenever. That structure is the difference between a sticker set you use and one that lives in a drawer, because you can decorate next month's spread in one sitting without digging through a thousand unrelated shapes to find a compatible one.

The designs are the reason we keep coming back. Each month is colour-coordinated — autumn tones for October, soft pastels for spring — so a spread looks planned even when you have stuck down four stickers and called it a day. There are goal prompts and quote stickers alongside headers, date covers and small icons, and the stickers are thick and glossy enough to sit flat on the page rather than curl at a corner.

Where the set earns its keep is a monthly log you would otherwise leave bare: a title sticker, a few date covers and one accent shape turn a plain grid into a page you want to open. For anything that needs to move — a habit tracker you redraw every week — a strip of washi is the better tool, because these are meant to go down once.

Seven rolls at 15mm, seven at 8mm and seven at 3mm — and it is the 3mm that makes this set worth owning. A 3mm strip rules a habit tracker or marks a page edge without burying the writing underneath, which a standard 15mm roll simply cannot do. The two wider sizes handle dividers, photo corners and the band across the top of a new month.

The prints are florals, pastels, vintage leaves and a few holiday hearts: soft enough to sit behind handwriting without fighting it, and varied enough that two spreads built from the same set do not look alike. Washi tears by hand, so there is no scissors step in the middle of a spread, and a strip that lands crooked can usually be lifted and reset before it settles into the paper.

We keep coming back to it for those narrow rolls, and it is also the set to buy before you know what you like. Adhesion is the one variable worth naming: on smooth, coated planner paper a strip may lift at the edge after a few days, and on very thin paper lifting it back off can take fibres with it. Press along the length of the strip rather than at the ends, and keep the 3mm rolls for paper rather than plastic or card.

A 75mm roll is a different tool from the washi you are used to. One strip covers most of an A5 page width, which makes it the fastest way to build a cover page or frame a quote block, and this set includes two rolls at that size alongside a run of narrower ones and three rolls with gold foil worked into the print.

The designs are vintage: pressed flowers, mushrooms, botanical plates, lettering sheets and small architectural drawings, printed with enough contrast to read at a glance rather than dissolving into a wash. It is a decorative set first — the pattern is doing most of the work — and the paper is thin enough that you can layer a strip over a print without the page turning into a collage.

Our view is that this is the layering tape rather than the detail tape. Pair it with a narrow roll for the grids and rules and it earns its place; expect it to handle the bands and panels instead. Unwind slowly and at a low angle, because the paper is thin enough to tear as it comes off the roll, and add a dab of glue at the ends when you stick it to cardstock or a cover board.

Half of each tab is clear film and half is paper you can write on, a small design decision with a large practical payoff: the tab sits over the page edge without hiding the print underneath, and the writable half takes a gel pen, a ballpoint or a pencil. At 1 by 1.1 inches there is room for a word or a short date, which is about all a tab needs to carry.

You get 240 of them in two color families — a light set and a muted retro set — so a year of collections plus an index does not exhaust what is on the sheet. They come on backing cards rather than loose, which means you can peel one at a time and keep the rest flat in a pocket of the journal.

The technique that makes them work is sticking first and writing second. Place the tab on the page edge, burnish it with a thumbnail, then label it in position so the word sits level with the page instead of drifting up or down the edge. Writing a label flat on the sheet and applying it afterwards is how you end up with a row of tabs at four different angles.

Where these earn their place is navigation. An index only helps if you can find the collection fast, and a row of labeled tabs down the fore-edge turns a flip-through into a lookup — with the clear half keeping the heading you tabbed still readable. Ours went on the index, the future log and each month, and they were the fastest thing about the journal by the second week.

This is the only thing in our kit that lives inside the journal rather than on the desk: a slim metal bookmark with stencil cutouts, a straight edge along both sides and a profile that slips into the back pocket of an A5. That means a ruler is with you when a spread needs a straight line and you are nowhere near a desk.

The cutouts are the draw — banner shapes, small icons and simple headings you trace and then write inside. It is a genuinely nice idea for a journal you carry, and it removes the usual excuse that your lines are wonky because the ruler stayed at home.

The catch is scale. The openings are small and they suit a 0.20 to 0.30mm nib; a 0.5mm gel pen or a marker will blob inside the shape and smear when you lift it off the metal. Pair it with the 005 from the Micron set and the stencils behave. Try it with a gel pen and you will spend the evening wiping ink off a bookmark.

As a straight edge it does exactly what you want — always there, always true — and as a stencil it is a compromise, good for a banner over a date rather than lettering a whole title. The size that makes it portable is the size that makes the symbols tiny, and that is the trade you are accepting. Buy it for the ruler and treat the shapes as the bonus.