Drawing On Cuben

i have tried lots of things but nothing has cleanly wiped off for me. so i use a bic pen as it leaves the thinnest least visible line. i sew over much of the time hiding it. just make sure the ink is flowing well and don't push to hard unless you are marking a cut line, then who cares.

-Tim

Since the surface of cuben fiber is mylar, it reminds me of when I used to do drafting work for Boeing. They kept hard copies of their engineering drawings on thick mylar sheets. We would draw on it with regular drafting pens and pencils. The pens would be harder to erase, but the pencils were just about as easy to erase as it would be if it were paper. The mylar may have had a coating. It was rough on the surface, and we had to take great care not to rub through that surface because then it would become extremely slippery and difficult to draw on.

I use a fine-tip sharpie. One of those that has a needle-like tip with a very tiny felt and a thin, cylindrical shape (not the torpedo shape of a regular sharpie). Most of the ink comes off with acetone without harming the cuben, I found, but I don't usually bother removing the lines except to avoid confusion if I've made a marking error.

Actually, wouldn't a dry erase marker work? I may give it a shot. Not on the quilt Tim made me though.

Scratch that. I can't find my dry erase markers.

I second Eugene. Dry-erase (and wet erase probably) should work with mylar, but I have no first hand experience.

Thanks for the replies, I'll try on an corner or scrap to find out which works best for me!

i tried dry erase with no luck. I'd love to know if others find it works, maybe the type/brand of marker matters.

-Tim

I haven't tried this on cuben personally, but on other fabrics it comes of quite easily with water. Crayola Washable markers http://www.crayola.com/products/list.cfm?categories=WASHABLE

I've used dry erase quite a bit on cuben. Sometimes it comes off great…..sometimes not so much. I've found that cuben seems to have two sides to it. One side is a bit smoother, while the other side is a bit more textured from the underlying spectra strands. You can't really see the difference, you just observe it when you try to wipe off dry erase marker. Unfortunately, the 'good' side of the material isn't always the same side. Within the same run of fabric, one side can be the smooth side for a while and then it'll switch and the other side is smoother.

What I do is test how easily it will come off by making a few dots in the general area I need to mark. If those come off easy, then I just go crazy drawing all my lines and usually they all come off easily. If it doesn't come off easy then I try the other side and usually that works. If not, then I just use the marker sparingly and rub harder to get 90% of it off after. If you don't apply it too heavily, you can always get at least most of it off. If you use a color that is similar to the color of your cuben then the consequences will be less if it doesn't come off so great.