Posts filed under Midori

Midori Yuru (Casual Life) Log Notebook B6 Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)

The goal of the Midori Yuru Log notebooks is to make journaling more casual. If you're the type of person who worries about ruining your nice notebooks, this might help. The pages were designed to be playful and welcoming to help you overcome your perfectionism. The casual vibe does help with this, but it might actually be too cute to truly erase the fear of ruining it. Notebooks were made to be used, though, and using this one is a delight.

The notebook has a linen textured cardstock cover in a charming cat design. It has 40 sheets of dot-grid MD paper, which is some of the best paper in the world, in my opinion. Each spread of pages has art of cats living their best cat lives, with coffee, plants, books, and even some stationery! The art is super charming and in a colorful but relaxing color palette. The binding is glued, but the notebook does lie flat after a bit of training.

The paper is fantastic, which is what I'd expect from Midori. It's their ivory color, which is my personal favorite. It handles nearly any writing tool you'd like to use with no feathering, bleeding, and very little show-through. You can use both sides of these sheets, giving you a solid 80 pages of adorable, casual journaling.

This notebook is perfect for a commonplace book. Or logging an ongoing list of cute things your cats do. Really, it would work for any purpose. Do you need to add some casual whimsy to your meeting notes? Does your homework lack adorableness? Here's the cure.

The Midori Yuru Log Notebook sells for $14.50, which does feel a little high for a softcover with 40 sheets. The Life B6 notebook, which is just two dollars more, has 100 sheets, for example. And the Kokuyo Campus B6 with 40 sheets is $3. However, neither of these has cute cats. That's a very important difference.

There are quite a few other delightful designs of the Midori Yuru Log Notebook, with several floral designs and some themed ones like travel. If you're stuck staring at a beautiful notebook that feels too formal for your thoughts, give these a try.

(Vanness Pens provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Posted on July 2, 2026 by Sarah Read and filed under Midori, Notebook Reviews.

Midori Household Items To Do List Memo Pad Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)

Household chores are a hundred times easier to complete when your list is cute. I'm pretty sure that's science. And Midori has put that science to use in this Memo Pad To Do List featuring Household Items.

Midori Household Items To Do List Memo Pad

The pad is small, about an A6 size, and features 80 tear-away sheets. There are two designs with 40 sheets each. One has a reddish color with kitchen items (flour and a cooking scale) and one is lime green with cleaning items (a broom and dustpan). The illustrations are cute line drawings that make chores look sweet and romanticized, and not like torture at all.

Each sheet has a pre-printed checklist for ten items. There's a column for the date, a cute house-shaped check box, and the line to write down your task. There’s also a spot for notes at the bottom of the sheet.

The sheets tear away cleanly from the glue binding at the top. There's a cardstock cover that keeps the pages nice between uses. The paper itself is ivory colored. It's very thin paper, and not coated to be fountain pen friendly. Rollerball, marker, and fountain pen (and Sharpie, of course) all had some bleed-through. Pencil, ballpoint, and gel pen worked fine. But of course, this isn't really writing paper, and it's meant to be disposable. While I love writing even my most mundane notes in elegant fountain pens, I can make my laundry list in pencil. I mean, as long as it's a nice pencil.

The memo pad is very inexpensive at $3.50 from Vanness Pens. With 80 sheets of ten tasks each, that's 800 tasks for that price! At the rate I'm going, that should last me a whole afternoon. And it's cheaper than a cup of coffee these days, which I also need to get through all the tasks. This cute list helps, and all help is welcome!

(Vanness Pens provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Sarah Read and filed under Midori, Notebook Reviews.

Midori 5 Year Diary With Embroidered Black Cover Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)

We humans love our memories. From the social media memories features, to "On This Day in History" columns, to our genealogy research--we cherish the past. And the only way for future generations to do the same is if we record the present. I feel pretty confident in saying that your grandkids aren't going to have access to your Facebook memories, and whether that makes you sad or relieved, you'll need another way--an analogue way--to pass down your voice. Thank goodness for the journaling renaissance that's happening right now. Daily pages, journals, diaries, commonplace books--all these volumes will give the future a clearer window into these "interesting times."

Midori 5 Year Diary Embroidered Black Cover

If you're looking for a way to record your thoughts over a passage of time, the Midori 5 Year Diary is the perfect place to start. Each page of the book is labeled with the date, and then divided into five sections, one for each consecutive year. You make your entry each day, then at the end of the year, start back at the beginning. The daily sections are small, encouraging brevity, so it never takes more than a minute or two to complete your daily entry. It's still just enough room to list your day's headlines.

You don't even need to use it for general entries. The format would work very well as a baby book, a weather log, a mood or health tracker, a business or career tracker, an ink journal, or travel journal. It looks rigid, but it is endlessly flexible.

The Midori 5 Year Diary comes in a number of colors. All of them look fantastic. This special embroidery edition comes in both black and white. The cover is a cotton or linen fabric with colorful stitchwork. The embroidery is done in actual thread--it isn't a printed image. It is very pretty and tactile. It comes with a vinyl book cover to protect the stitchwork, but I've taken that off so I can enjoy the texture. I don't care if it gets worn--in fact, I expect it to, after five years of use. Assuming I can keep it up. So far, so good.

Inside the beautiful cover are 193 sheets of ivory Midori MD paper. It's top-tier paper and performs well with almost anything.

The standard edition of the 5 Year Diary sells for $42.50, and this embroidered edition sells for $65. That's very steep for a notebook, even one intended to be an heirloom. This is one of those cases where it's worth it to you if it's worth it to you. It is very well made, clearly designed to stand up to those long years of use. If you're intending for it to be a future gift to a loved one, then this level of quality makes sense.

(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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