There’s been some hype about these new pens on the market: Pilot Frixion Erasable Gel Pens. The funny thing is, they weren’t designed for marking on fabric, but quilter’s have discovered this pen as being really effective!
I most often use a chalk marker for marking on darker fabrics, such as the these Chaco Liners. For white or cream colored fabrics, sometimes a good solid line is what you need to mark your fabrics. I decided to try the Frixion Erasable Gel Pens out for a test run to see how they measure up. In the photos, the words, “eraser” and “iron” are written in permanent marker on both a dark fabric, and a light fabric. The happy faces below are drawn with the Frixion Erasable Gel Pens in red, black, and blue colors.
I ironed the fabric, and voila! The mark vanished.

In this photo you can see my attempts to erase the marks on the left. I felt it pulled the fabric too much, and it required a bit of effort.
The heat of the friction is what makes the pen mark almost disappear. It still leaves a white ‘ghost’ appearance after it’s been ironed over. Here’s what the ‘ghost’ looks like on darker fabric:
The cool part about these pens is that the marks do come back if they are set in a cold temperature for 5-10 minutes, such as a freezer.

After 10 minutes in the freezer, the lighter fabric’s marks clearly came back. The darker fabric’s marks did not come back as easily.
And the marks did not reappear once the fabric warmed back up to room temperature again.
I also experimented with rinsing the fabrics in cold tap water. The marks really did reappear this time.

This test shows the marks vanishing again, even after I froze the fabric to make the marks reappear just moments ago.
So, there you have it. The Frixion Erasable Gel Pens work really well as far as I’m concerned, although I might just use them on lighter fabrics. I’m really happy I played around with these pens and I think they will work wonders for quilters!
Quilters: have you tried these pens? What are your thoughts?