non-disappearing lines

As a follow up to yesterday’s little challenge of the disappearing lines, I felt that I needed to come up with a fully workable solution, seeing the project is going into a magazine. I can’t imagine that putting, “if you use a water-soluble fabric marker you’ll need to get the whole thing stitched within a week or the lines might disappear” would be really very helpful for the majority of readers who don’t quite have a whole week to just devote to embroidering a curtain! I know I didn’t!

So I pondered a solution. One idea that I had was to find out if I could get a permanent Pigma pen (or similar thing of another brand) in a pale colour that would be able to be covered over by the stitching. But then I realised that there wasn’t one colour that would work with all the colours of thread that I had used. And I wouldn’t be sure that a permanent marker like that wouldn’t bleed when I drew it on the “fabric” (remember, its basically plastic, being 100% polyester) anyway.

So then I wondered about using a sharp HB pencil. I wasn’t sure that this would properly mark the fibres. But there was one way to find out – try it. And so I did. Surprisingly it worked beautifully. It went on nicely, and stayed there. It was thin enough to be completely covered over by the stitching. I used a pencil with a propelling lead – you know, a clicky type pencil, where you click the end and the fine lead moves up through the middle?

So there you have it: if you need to draw a pattern onto 100% polyester organza fabric, you can use a sharp HB pencil.

Happy days!