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Thank you, once again, for re-stating the obvious. I still know many quilters who swear by these pens. My new point of view is it’s their quilt to spend a lot of money on to ruin, not my problem. cdahlgren at live dot com
Even if you write with a heavy hand and create indents on the paper, FriXion ink will disappear so long as heat is able to reach it. The “erased” sections can be written over and “erased” as many times as needed. Thank you, all, for your thoughts and sharing your experiences. Many quilts take a significant amount of time, the cost of the materials can also be significant. Each of us must decide whether the risk is worth the use of the Frixion pen or other chemically-based products. Another source of chemicals would are the brand of spray starch or fabric finishes used during the pressing process. Great, thorough research and write up. Thanks! I’ve had no problem, but I live in Southern CA and we never drop below 45 at the absolute coldest. Now I’ll think twice if I’m going to be sending something away from home. Chemistry is everything. I used to be a stamping teacher and was always explaining the properties of different inks to students, so this makes total sense to me. I admire the company for being open with you. I bought a set of these pens at a QUILT SHOW! Good demo was evasive about use on fabric but said go ahead. I should have known better when several lost their ink and the co. advise freezing them for 30 minutes. I guess that happens to them on fabric in the cold. I hope I didn’t use them on gifts.I too blogged about these pens after having a heart-wrenching experience on a show quilt. Thinking to wash out the Frixion ink after extensive domestic machine quilting, I washed the quilt in cold water with regular laundry detergent. The cold water caused all the marks to return. I was in tears. Heat ironing again made the marks disappear, but knowing the ink is still there makes me feel sad about all the hours put into my quilt. Thinking all the marks were heated away, I sent the quilt to MQX in New Hampshire. Later, judges comments included telling me to be sure to remove all quilt markings. I’ll never know if I missed heating those out, or cold temps caused them to return. No Frixion pen will ever touch my quilts again, and I share this caution with students in my beginner quiltmaking and domestic machine quilting classes. Thanks for your thorough confirmation of my own opinion about using Frixion on fabric!
My first comment didn’t come through. So I try it again. How are the experiences with washing? I always wash my Quilts and Cushions before I use them or gift them. So far I never saw a mark reappear. Did pilot say something to that? Because I really do not like use harsh stain removers on my sewn stuff, especially when it’s made for kids. That’s “hunting around for” SOMETHING. Also, I meant to say that I’m sure the marking industry could make us something that works like the Frixion pens but doesn’t leave anything behind if they put their mind to it. It would sell like hotcakes. :D Yes I had my blue marks disappear once also and that was disappointing. I just wanted quilters to understand what the product is and its limitations. I too use it when I need a mark and it won’t show afterwards. Thanks for writing Michele! I used to sell them when I taught workshops but it took too long to tell each possible buyer the cautions about it. I agree-the perfect pen in the right situation!
How Do Frixion Pens Work? “Pilot Frixion pen” by matsuyuki is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ This is what the majority of people actually want to know when they ask how a Frixion pen works due to the unique thermo-sensitive ink that the Frixion range use. Keep in mind that the competing erasable pens on the market that use a friction erasable ink also use a very similar system to the Frixion range but at the time of writing, the vast majority are no where near as effective as what Pilot use. Thanks for the good info. I use friction pens all the time and have had very few problems. I don’t use them on dark fabric because that’s where the ghost marks usually show up. I can usually get the ghost marks out with several applications of water. So while the ability to erase is nice, it’s not really always a good idea to use the pens, depending on what you intend to do with that piece of paper!
I do not know whether anyone else mentioned this, but we also have “other chemicals” that could be interacting with the inks – these would be waxes and any treatment used on batiks to easily lift the wax after the dye is applied, the chemicals in the dyes, the chemistry of our water in the area where we live – perhaps this water element is THE key contributing factor that affects the ability of some quilters to remove the ink when laundering and others who saw no difference after laundering. I tried a sample piece of fabric and after normal washing….no spot cleaning or special ink removers, and it all came out. No ghost marks or even after putting it in the freezer…no marks reappeared. I did not try on different fabrics or different colors of fabric, or different colored pens. May be different results if I experimented further.Thank you for this post – excellent information. I only have one of those pens and will not be using it anymore. If it’s not for fabric what is it designed for? Quilters wrote articles noting that if the marks reappeared in the cold, it was because the quilter did not thoroughly steam the marks. This simply is not the case. The ink combination used in the pens has two parts-one part makes the mark and one part makes the mark disappear. There is still ink left on your quilt after steaming, you just can’t see it. The ink is still there and will reappear in the cold. Any heat will make the ink disappear so a hot car will do it. They are made to disappear so I wouldn’t use them on anything I wanted to keep. I think the original intent was for children the create disappearing messages.
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