Great info here - I have 2 - One I bought many many years ago at a QS and the other was a gift - never tried either!

I vaguely remember a fellow quilter warning me that the chalk in certain colours will not wash out or is difficult to remove after using - was it the yellow? Guess that's why I never used it.

I also have used the fabric pounce with not so great results as well as the other methods besides chalk that were mentioned. I now use wash away fabric stable as my go to marking tool. It comes in yardage and I trace my design onto the stabilizer and pin it to my quilt top. I am a hand quilted and used this method to quilt a full size quilt. When finished it all washed away with no trace left behid.

I tried the Press N Seal at a class last week. It was a mess for me and most of the other class members. The few that didn't have a problem didn't use it. LOL

I also had no luck with the pounce pad. Pounced as hard as I could, then tried the powder with the foam brush. Neither way worked. I like the Fons and Porter roll on chalks. They work very well for me, even with a stencil.

This is my method and it works well.

This is how one of the Craftsy teachers shows in her classes.

I'm with several others--the Press & Seal method was a mess for me! never again! (I do use it to try out some designs but no longer stitch through it).

When I use chalk in a stencil, I use the chalk in a baggie & a foam brush like Rob described. It works fine, but I use on long arm and only chalk what is needed right then.

When I first got my pounce I couldn't get it to work right either. Then I went to a local fabric shop and she told me to take it outside and pound it on the sidewalk. Once the newness wore off the chalk gets through it works fine now. I use it with stencils I bought. I swipe it and pounce it both. When I'm using a lighter fabric I use my fabric pens that come out with heat. Wash the quilt when I'm finished and it all comes out in the wash.

According to Leah Day, the proper way to use the pounce pad is to "charge" it by slamming it hard onto a flat surface to force the chalk through the pad before wiping onto the stencil. You don't actually pat it onto the stencil, as that just makes clouds of chalk and a big mess. The first time you use it, you do have to charge it a ton to get the chalk flowing, but afterwards, store it pad side up so the chalk doesn't continue to sift down.

Hancy stencils: because they are thin nylon and the cut out part is a mesh, you have to make sure you've anchored it really well so that when you swipe, the motion doesn't move the stencil. Make sure you're doing it on a hard surface. Either tape the stencil down, or get extra hands to help hold it down. Or put pattern weights/books/something to hold the edges down so you can hold the portion you're swiping without the whole thing shifting.

The hair spray tip that other people have mentioned works really well.

Great tip, I'll have to try this. I have the blue and the white chalk, so far only tried blue. I get it onto the fabric fine (after lots and lots of pounding, it's finally coming through nicely) but when I start to sew all the blue lines just vibrate away!

I might try the chalk-in-a-baggie idea too; that sounds pretty easy.

Press-n-seal works OK for me as long as it's not a design that involves a lot of backtracking. Once I've gone over a line of stitches more than once, it's a nightmare to pick all those little shreds of plastic out of the stitches.

My normal go-to for marking is the blue water-erase pens, but I have come *this close* to forgetting and ironing those lines in, I figure it's only a matter of time before I forget and screw that up, and I'm betting it'll be on something important... Plus those markers don't work with all those nice mesh stencils that I've invested so much in!