2020 Roman Style

This month, I'm following Project Quilting, Season 11 hosted by Persimon Dreams on Instagram.    Project Quilting  The first prompt is "Notably Numeric." 

 We're to make a quilted thing, from start to finish between Jan 5 and Jan 12, somehow relating to the numeric theme.


My thought process ran like this:
 I've seen several people warning us all to fill in the date completely lest we be victimized by someone trying to backdate checks or other documents when we lazily just write " '20 ".  

This made me consider if and how this very issue may have been a problem for people using Roman numerals (Romans and others in their Empire, for example).


I then thought about how this year's MMXX is a particularly interesting date, Roman numerically speaking, and would translate to fun graphics.  Or quilt blocks.

Since I had lots of scraps on my work table floor, I just used the rough cut strips to play with making some roman numerals in fabric.  No precision happening here, and that shows up in points not matching perfectly and my numerals being different sizes.  I decided to make that a feature rather than a flaw because this is play time.

Once I had my roughly constructed numerals stitched, I decided that a hot pad would be the very thing to use them up.  Hot pads in my house are very utilitarian, and I expect them to wear out and be thrown away after a year or two, so they are a perfect place to use scraps and improvisation.

My hot pads have 2 layers of Warm and Natural batting and one layer of Insulbrite in addition to the pieced front and the solid back.

I use the faux binding technique as it's fast and easy and there is no hand stitching at all (see above about how hotpads are by no means heirloom quality at our house).  I like to do some detailed quilting with only the pieced top and one layer of batting, then construct all the layers, and add some minimal quilting through all the layers, just enough for structural integrity. 

So -- about 15 minutes of doodling while I was on hold scheduling a plumber and 2 hours of playing in the sewing room, and I'm done with week 1 of Project Quilting.