Looking for the perfect pen to use on tracing appliqué or embroidery designs on fabric? Well, the truth is that there isn’t one perfect pen: there are air erasable, water erasable, chalk, etc. and each of them have their pros and cons. My favourite temporary marking pen to use is the Pilot Frixion pen. It creates an easy to see mark that can be erased later by the heat of an iron.

There is one possible problem: there are rumours that the marks might come back when exposed to cold. To see if this was true, I decided to put the Pilot Frixion pen to the test.

I could easily remove the marks made by the Frixion pen with my iron as the ink is removed with heat. Remember, these pens were originally designed to be used on paper and not for fabric (don’t use a Frixion pen to write a cheque!). While the marks came off easily using an iron, I wanted to see if they would come back when exposed to extreme cold.

After tracing a few designs onto cotton fabric, I put the sample in my freezer and left it overnight. I thought that this would probably be the coldest that my fabric might ever get – and hopefully it never gets this cold in my studio! The marks did come back on the fabric, but I could still easily remove them again with the heat of an iron.

There can be similar issues with other types of temporary fabric marking pens, so always be sure to do a test before you use a product on your fabric and find out that the marks come back and can’t be erased again.

To learn more about using Pilot Frixion pens on your fabric projects, click on the image below to watch a video on my YouTube channel.

If you haven’t tried out the Pilot Frixion pen, I would encourage you to do so. They are inexpensive and readily available in most office supply stores or you can click here to get some for your studio.

Creatively,

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