Monthly planning MTN : overview november & december 2015

Last year I bought the blue midori and an open monthly planner to give the 'monthly planning thing' a go and make good use of my sakuralala 365 stamps. So I have finished november and also did december 2015 and wanted to share my pages and also some issues I have with the paper of the planner here.

This is what the finished month of november looks like. I use this planner to track the fun things happening in the month and it was definitely a month with some great memorable moments. I love how the little planner stamps can give it such a visual overview. I decorated the lower open space with some fun stickers and other stamps, using the memento dew drop color scheme you see above.

When I was ready to start on december I encountered a problem with the paper.

I found that I had significant bleed through on both sides of the paper as you can see here. I used the memento stamp inks and fountain pen inks and they both seem to bleed through. I've heard from some other people that this paper is indeed bleed/show through sensitive, but I have not found a solution yet. I have tried something for the december page, but I'm not satisfied with that result. I used artist Gel medium, mixed with a bit of water, to prime a few pages, but it resisted some inks and I could not work with it properly. Still I did the best I could with those prepped pages.

An overview of december. The right page I put on a thicker coating and the left page a medium coating. The thicker coating completely resisted all water soluble inks, so for that side I had to use Staz on stamp ink and sharpies. The left side could be worked on but still showed some resisting. I had to use my heat tool to set the ink I used (Diamine shimmertastic blue pearl which I had in my Pilot Retro Pop) I do like the overview, nice and visual again, but due to the resist it has a bit of a blurry look and less clean and sharp as november was.

A close up so you can see the 'shiny sheen' of the gel medium I used. And I had to write over it several times sometimes to get the ink to stick. So it was an interesting experiment, but I won't be using gel medium to prep my pages again. At least not such a thick coating. By the way, that cute little moon charm I received from my penpal Ambra, I just love it :)

Since it's really fun doing these monthly overviews, I'm gonna give it another try for January and not prep the pages, but use different stamp ink. The crafty peeps at Sakuralala said they use versamark inks and  have minimal bleed through. I have a few of those chalk inks I can try to use. Also will use drier writing inks that are less absorbent on paper.  I am curious to see how this will work out in the next overview. 

If you have encountered this bleed though issue yourself and have found a remedy for it, please let me know. 
Thanks for stopping by.

Namasté