I’m sure we’ve all heard horror stories about various methods of marking fabric.

The ones where the mark should have come off and didn’t, and the ones where the mark came off too soon. My worst experience was when I was little. I was working on a picture of Westminster Abbey, in brown stem stitch on cream cotton. Mum was doing one of Worcester cathederal at the time, where by brother was a chorister. He still has that picture. Mine never got finished, because the printed lines wore off the fabric. I tried to improvise, but it didn’t work.

I try to avoid marking the fabric, except for things like this picture, when you know it won’t show, and the easiest thing is to mark the seam line in pencil and cut the shapes out afterwards.

I’m a big fan of drawing on paper, sewing with the machine through the paper and fabric, and then tearing the paper off.

But sometimes, you can’t get away without using a textile marker, so this post is useful for explaining the differences between some fabric marking tools.