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Do Crayola Markers Wash Out of Fabric?

Quilters and stitchers mark fabric with a kids' washable marker, and it usually comes out. Here's the test to run before you trust it with real work.

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Digby stands at a sewing table by a sunny window, holding a dripping patchwork block over an enamel basin. A faint pink line still runs across one cream square, and he's staring at it with a worried "oh no" face.

Quilters, dressmakers and cross-stitchers all draw on fabric and then need the drawing gone.

A quilter draws the lines the stitching will follow across the whole top. A dressmaker marks where a dart folds or a button sits. A cross-stitcher grids the fabric before the first stitch: lines every ten holes across the stiff, evenly woven cloth the craft is sewn on. That makes the squares on the pattern easier to count.

The sewing aisle sells chalk, soap slivers and blue water-soluble pens for all of it. The marker a lot of them use instead comes from the school-supplies shelf. It's the Crayola Ultra-Clean washable markers, the ten-pack made for children. Do they wash out? Usually, but not always.

The misses depend on the colour and the fabric. If you're about to draw on a quilt top or a grid you'll spend months stitching, the tip comes with a test attached.

Can you use Crayola washable markers on fabric?

In r/sewing, someone fed up with marking tools marked up a cotton scrap with the Ultra-Clean markers in 2023. They posted a photo of it before the wash and one wet from the machine.

The top reply came from a user who'd used them for years: they show on nearly any fabric, they wash out easily and they leave nothing behind.

A quilter ran a tidier test in 2025. Marker on cotton, a cotton-silk blend and polyester, two ways: ironed and then a hot wash with detergent, or straight into a cold wash. Every sample came out clean both ways.

Another quilter in that thread found a nearly finished quilt they'd marked in brown and purple on light grey. It had sat folded away for about five years and an international move. A cold wash took the marks out about ninety percent, and a stain remover and a second wash left them visible only if you go looking.

When they didn't wash out

The most-upvoted reply on that 2025 test isn't a cheer, though:

Make sure to test them on the fabric you are using regardless if they passed the test on other fabric. Ask me how I know.

u/Fourpatch, in r/quilting

One reply under it explains the last line. The quilter marked a top with about forty-five fabrics and had four hold the ink until two different stain removers shifted it. They still use them. Their success rate beats coloured tailor's chalk, which has left stains on one of their quilts, and the blue water-soluble pens, which have bleached their fabric.

Two quilting blogs walked away, both over blue. The Crafty Quilter's Julie Cefalu washed a quilt on a gentle cycle and put it through the dryer, and the blue marks stayed on two of four blocks until an OxiClean scrub. The result probably isn't typical, by the post's own reckoning, but Cefalu won't take the chance again. Shirley Sandoz, the quilter behind Mystery Bay Quilt Design, sprayed cold water over a blue Crayola and a blue water-soluble pen on white fabric. The pen's marks went, the Crayola's bled and made a mess, and a scrub still left a shadow.

Put together, the markers come out of most fabrics most of the time, and blue is the colour named in most of the failures. The same pack can pass on one fabric and fail on the next.

Up close at the table, Digby draws one short pink line on a small scrap of cream fabric, smiling a little. The folded quilt, a pincushion and a spool of thread sit beside him, untouched.

What sets the marks

Four things come up when the marks stayed, and the swatch test below has to copy each one.

  • Heat. Crayola's own stain advice for its washable markers is a hot machine wash, then no dryer and no heat-drying between washes until the mark has gone. A 2025 sewing-thread test used a different brand of kids' washable marker. The chambray swatch ironed before washing left ghost marks in every colour, but the unironed one didn't.

    One person in that thread irons over Crayola marks all the time and says it sometimes sets the ink. A few minutes in OxiClean shifts it for them. Against that, the quilter's 2025 test ironed one set of samples before the hot wash and they came out anyway. An iron doesn't doom the marks, but it's the step the reports blame most.

  • Time. A quilter in the 2023 sewing thread marked a quilt in yellow and life got in the way for about six months. The little yellow marks are now a "design feature" on the finished quilt. The five-year quilt above washed out, so neither is a rule.

  • Stain remover. One parent in that 2025 sewing thread warns that stain remover can make them permanent, learned by treating yellow marker on a child's clothes as a fruit stain. Everyone else in these reports who reached for one got the marks out, the forty-five-fabric quilter and Julie Cefalu among them. Crayola's own page says to soak in OxiClean or Clorox 2 for an hour.

  • Too little water. A quilter marked up a whole top in blue for a gift and washed it in a front-loading machine. The marker faded but stayed clearly visible in places, and seemed to have dyed the white thread blue-grey. They suspect the low water in the front loader. One reply says a long overnight soak with a dash of laundry soap takes it all out.

How to test a marker on your fabric

The test is cheap and the project isn't, so run it on a scrap of the real thing.

  • The real fabric, the real colours. One quilter replying to the 2025 quilting test used them on a quilt in about twenty colours of the same cloth, and the marks came out of all but two. Draw one line of each colour you'll use, on each fabric it'll touch.
  • A second scrap that waits with the project. The quick test decides the marker, but it can't tell you what months on the fabric will do. Mark a second scrap at the same time, keep it with the quilt top, and wash it first when the top is finished. If it comes out with a shadow, the quilt gets a long soak or OxiClean before it goes in the machine, the fixes that shifted stubborn marks in the reports above.
  • Washed the way the finished piece will be. Same machine, same temperature, same detergent. Iron the scrap if you'll iron the quilt, and give it the dryer if the quilt will see one.

The quilter with the blue-grey thread tested a scrap first. It came out clean and the quilt didn't, so a passed swatch narrows the odds without closing them.

One quilter under the 2025 test keeps the markers off anything that will show, and uses purpose-made water-soluble markers for the rest.

Are Crayola Fabric Markers permanent?

Yes, and this is the trap in the name. Crayola also sells a line called Fabric Markers, and its own FAQ lists them among the products that are permanent on fabric. The instructions say to heat-set them with an iron or a dryer. The one the quilters mean says "Ultra-Clean" and "Washable" on the box. Buy by that name, not by "fabric".

The washable pack comes in two tips. The broad line is the fat classic marker. The fine line is the one Crayola sells for writing in small areas, which is the obvious shape for a dart or a buttonhole mark.

The swatch test covers either tip.

There's no white in the pack, as one reply to the 2023 cotton-scrap test points out, so these are a light-fabric tool. The forty-five-fabric quilter switches to white chalk on anything too dark for them.

Back at the basin, Digby holds up the washed scrap, completely clean, and smiles. The quilt sits dry and folded beside him, with the marker tucked under its edge.

Order the Ultra-Clean ten-pack, and run the scrap test before it goes anywhere near the quilt.

A clean scrap and the marker gets the quilt. A shadow, and this project gets the blue pen from the sewing aisle while the markers go to the kids' drawer, which is where they were headed anyway.