If you are anything like me, you have a few pens in your collection. I’m not talking about the fountain pens (although those are certainly in there!), but the rollerballs, gels, highlighters, fine liners, pencils, erstwhile ballpoints… the whole lot. And while I keep them at my desk, and by my journals and notebooks I’m always looking for more places to use them.
At the same time, I have taken up quilting in the past few years. And you know what you need to do sometimes in quilting? You need to mark sewing lines on your fabric.
I recently worked on a project where I needed to mark approximately 200 fabric squares with sewing lines. Normally you mark the fabric on the back side so that once you’re done sewing an trimming it ends up on the inside of the quilt. And there are plenty of markers for this. Some folks use Frixion pens, some use water soluble fabric ink pens (to varying degrees of success). I even found a Sakura Gelly Roll pen in white that was sold in a few fabric stores as a way to mark dark fabrics.
Well, heck. I have so many writing implements… I don’t need a special pen! So here are my tests. In general they more or less look the same. I will say that in practice the mechanical pencil skips a lot on the fabric (the point is small enough to catch it). I’d probably have better luck with a regular old #2 pencil, but I married an engineer so Bic mechanicals are plentiful around our house. One of my favorite gel pens, the Pilot G-2 Juice writes better on a paper than fabric. And surprisingly, one of my ho-hum tests of yesteryear, the Pentel GlideWrite series, has proven the most reliable on my fabric!
Looks like I’ve got plenty more writing, and quilting, to do!