How To Remove Water-Soluble Marks From Fabric, With Ease
you’ve spent time and love making a beautiful quilt or garment and now you are ready to show the world!
There is so much love poured into our hand-made work and whether its something we’ve made for ourselves or a gift for that someone special there comes a time in our journey when those little blue marks have to go away.
I remember one time when I was teaching a course at Martha Pullen School of Art Fashion working for hours and hours using silk dupioni. It was a lovely sky blue color and during the hand-making of the project I fell in love with silk. My project was turning out better than expected after some minor fixes and I was ready to clean it up for my husband, Marv to take the beauty shots to send off for creatives. You can probably tell where this story is headed…
HOW TO REMOVE WATER-SOLUBLE MARKS
- If your project has any tearaway stabilizers or toppers gently remove
- Fill a bucket, bowl or sink with clean fresh water
- Because this is the most important point it bears repeating. Do not add soap, cleaners or any chemicals to your water. Soap or additives can cause a CHEMICAL REACTION with the water-soluble ink. To be safe, never use addititives until after you follow the steps below and are sure the ink has been washed away.
- Soak your project in water until the marks have disappeared and discard the water. Notice I used the word SOAK. Think immersion, not sprinkling. Sprinkinling doesn’t remove the water-soluble ink. It moves it around and thins the ink concentration.
- Pour a fresh batch of clean water into your container and soak again for another 20 minutes and then discard the water
- Wring out the excess water and wrap it up in a big bath towel and do a little jig on the towel to remove the excess water
- After this process you can launder with soap as desired
Now back to my disaster story. I followed the steps above to remove the blue marks and not only did they not disappear, they turned an ugly grey. You can imagine my feeling of panic thinking I would have to spend another 40 hours remaking my sample. Want to know why the marks turned grey? It wasn’t because I used additives in the water. The culprit was that during the process of blocking off my pattern on paper, I used a fine line permenant marker with my quilting ruler. I discovered the edge of my ruler had residual black ink that reacted with the water-soluble ink. I now have an older quilting ruler that is dedicated to drawing patterns with permenant markers and I don’t use it for anything else.
looking for videos on how to use scan-n-cut 2 – bought at a great price but no lessons included on how to use
There are a few places to find videos for SNC2 with more being added. https://hopeyoder.com/how-to-group-multiple-objects-on-a-scanncut/ & https://hopeyoder.com/category/digital-cutting/. Please check back weekly for added videos and blog post regarding ScanNCut. We have filmed several and they are in the process of being edited.
Did you find a way to remove. Ive been trying to work out why i have igly yellow stains and i think the same thing happened as in your story. Did you fix your work?
At one time I had sharpie marker ink on the edge of my ruler and didn’t know it. It mixed in with my water-soluble marker and unfortunately I didn’t ever get it out. Have you ever tried Biz Bleach? It is a whitening powder and I have had good success with that. Test a small area before trying it on the entire piece of fabric. Hope it works.
I bought an embroidery kit with a printed pattern on canvas (blue ink). After finishing the embroidery it says to soak the finished work for 20 minutes for the blue ink to disappear. Well, I have soaked it twice 20 minutes and the blue marks are still there. HELP. what else can I do to remove those ugly blue marks?
Hi Monique. I would contact the manufacturer to see if they have some direction for you. The ink probably isn’t the same as what I used in the article, and I don’t want to steer your the wrong way.