Ruined 3 months of bujo spreads with one cheap pen, learned my lesson the hard way

Jesse Lewis · 2026-09-24T05:40:04.795984+00:00

I was sitting at my kitchen table in Portland last Tuesday, finishing up my October weekly spread with a new pen I'd grabbed from the checkout line at the grocery store. Everything looked great until I flipped back to check my habit tracker from September, and the ink had bled straight through 12 pages. My whole monthly log, my mood tracker, the grocery list I'd been building for 6 weeks, all smeared and unreadable. I tried everything to fix it, even the hair dryer trick my sister swears by, but the pages were toast. Ended up cutting out the ruined spreads with an X-Acto knife and taping in fresh pages, which took me almost 2 hours and looks janky as hell. Now I test every single pen on the last page of my journal before it touches a real spread, no exceptions. What's your go-to test method for new pens, and has anyone found a way to actually save a page after a bleed disaster?

The Community Guide

Loading…

Ruined 3 months of bujo spreads with one cheap pen, learned my lesson the hard way | Bullet Journaling - The Community Guide