Marking your quilt #1

So I have made good progress until it came to the marking of my quilt. I am trying my brand-new Border stencils from Cindy Needham and needed to mark on a darker background, i.e. purple. I thought that my trusted blue water soluble markers were probably not such a good choice so I was hunting around in my sewing box for a white marker. For smaller marks and lines here and there I use the Sewline Ceramic pencil which works really well, but I did not think that was overly suitable for marking with a stencil. I do need the border design to stay on until I am ready to stitch this out.

A while ago I bought a White Marking Pen from a local quilt shop. The owner was swearing by it, i.e. best thing ever etc. It makes a very fine line that appears after a little while and you can then iron it out

I had not really tried this out in any great detail and thought I give that a go. The lines that this makes are very fine and very white, easy to see and apart from the wait for the lines to appear, this seemed to work well.

Until I made mistakes in the placement of my stencil. I am truly the world's worst marker...very impatient and usually only really start thinking it through once it occurs to me 'oh, this is not going to work!' I was trying to shrink the stencil by just winging it...yep, that did not work! I then went to the ironing board to make those lines disappear and yep, you guessed it, they did not come out.

Bit hard to see, but I think you get the picture. I was really annoyed with this, but probably most annoyed with my own stupidity...it's a chemical, that disappears with warmth, so it's reasonable to assume that the substance is still in the fabric rather than magically disappeared. I was going to throw the pens in the bin. Instead I re-did all of my border, unpicking everything and attaching a new border.

Since then I have stitched over this as a bit of a doodle and to work out which ruler I will use to stitch this out. I discovered that when you stitch on that purple line, you will not see it obviously and if I had marked this correctly, I could have gotten away with this. Knowing myself, this is never going to happen that I mark something absolutely correctly on the first go, so I will not use this pen for the marking of this border (as I have to do a bit of shrinking to fit it in the space). When calmer though, I thought that these pens do have a place in marking, for example when you transfer a motif. It is probably unlikely that you would get the placement wrong and then it would be just a matter of staying on the lines and to remember to put the registration lines on with some chalk or similar, so they come off easily.

Went on the internet and found some other pens which are chalk based and water soluble and found Roxanne's Quilter's Choice Marking Pencil through Quilter's Review so I ordered some of them to try out. Also ordered the Bohin Marking pen as I have heard good things about that one. We shall see...will do a bit of a post on all the different marking pens that I have in my collection. Truly infuriating, definitely need to find something that works for darker fabric once for all.

Karin