Rev. Shelvin Hall's Obituary

We were browsing the internet and stumbled upon Rev. Shelvin Hall's Obituary. Rev. Hall was the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church for 51 years. Friendship Baptist Church was located in North Lawndale in the 1960's, as was one of three churches in Chicago that welcomed Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. This photograph is included for education purposes only, and all rights are reserved by the Chicago Sun-Times.

We've Been Invited to Partner with City Year and Collins Academy High School to Prepare a School Quilt

I am very pleased that our North Lawndale African Heritage Quilting Project has been invited to participate with City Year and the Collins Academy to jointly create a quilt for the school. We will be working with parents and students to develop a one of a kind creation around the theme "Warriors: Past, Present, and Future" to celebrate our past accomplishments and to inspire the next generation. I am totally excited about the possibilities.

Thanks for Coming Out to the Drive-Thru Quilting Event

We thank each of you who was able to attend Saturday's Drive-Thru Quilting event. We thank Mssrs. Ronald Lofton Sr. and Ronald Lofton Jr. for their generous support of the event, including discounted meals for participants. We thank City Year volunteers who helped with the logistics and artistic vision, and got their hands dirty designing quilt blocks. We thank Reneau Diallo, Karen Bailey and Zoe Ann Nance for their leadership.

We displayed our very first quilt, and the quilt in progress prepared by Carey Tercentenary AME Church. We had a great turnout, and participants generated enough quilt blocks to pull together two quilts. We were so impressed by the work of a Viet Nam Vet who participated that we will pull his blocks together to make a separate quilt. We will display quilts from the project at McDonald's and take the show on the road when we get a critical mass of quilts. In the meantime, we will be working with schools and other organizations in the community to assist them in making quilts. If your organization is interested in participating, please contact me at valeriefleonard@msn.com. We are looking forward to strengthening the social fabric of our community.

We thank Paul Norrington and Seth Barnhart,  for sharing their photos. God willing, I will be able to provide you with more pics later this week.

Seth's Pictures

Paul's Pictures

Project Update February 10, 2012

Thanks again for your of the North Lawndale African American Heritage Quilting Project. Here is the latest update.

We Thank McDonald's for Their Commitment to the Project

We thank Mssrs. Ronald Lofton Sr and Ronald Lofton Jr for their generous support of this project. McDonald's will be running flyers with coupons for discounted meals for people who can provide proof of participation. Please find links to preliminary drafts of two flyer concepts. McDonald's will review them and add the coupons to the bottom. In the meantime, please, share these with your networks.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/81120066/Drive-Thru-Quilting-Flyer
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81118652/Drive-Thru-Quilting-Flyer-3

City Year

We thank City Year for partnering with us. They will be working with students at Collins to assist with research and pulling the quilt together.

They will also be reaching out to other AUSL schools in Lawndale, including Manley, Johnson and Chalmers to see if they are interested as well. There is potential for at least 17 young adults from City Year to participate, as well as students and staff from the schools. We will need to meet ahead of the Drive-Thru Quilting day to plan logistics and get a head start on productivity for the day. If you are interested in participating in that meeting let me know.

If you don't have time to help us plan, we welcome your participation. Feel free to stop by McDonald's on February 25, 2012, any time between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm. You can bring your own fabric, or use ours. We will help you develop a quilt block using traditional patterns, pictures, poems, your favorite Bible verse, description of block club traditions, etc. The goal of the project is to use quilting to document the
African American experience in North Lawndale. No experience needed.

Drive-Thru Quilting: Fast Food, Quilting to Go for Busy People

Drive-Thru Quilting Flyer

Drive-Thru Quilting at McDonald's on Roosevelt and Kedzie

NEIGHBOR MESSAGEWard 24

0MIN AGO

Lawndale Community Builder and Policy Analyst

Save the Date: February 25, 2012-Drive Thru Quilting at McDonald's on Roosevelt and Kedzie

by Valerie F. Leonard

The North Lawndale African American Heritage Quilting Project will host Drive-Thru Quilting in honor of Black History Month, on February 25, 2012 at McDonald's on Roosevelt and Kedzie, from 10:00 am.-3:00 p.m. We ask that you give us an hour or less of your time to prepare a quilt block.

You can

1. work with one of our experts to pull together a traditional block

2. draw a picture or symbol and color it with fabric paint or markers

3. bring a poem, paragraph, Bible verse, picture(s) of your family, friends, block club members, church, organization, etc so we can print copies onto fabric

4. bring fabric of your choice or use some of our fabrics

5. invite others to participate

Participants will be eligible for special discounts reserved for participants only.

I will provide flyers once they come back from the printer. In the meantime, please spread the word.

We thank Lofton & Lofton Management for their generous support of this event. The project partners include Better Boys Foundation, K-Town Historic District, Prevention Partnership Family Center and Urban Art Retreat. If you have any questions or would like to participate, let me know.

Project Update December 5, 2011

Thanks!!!! 

 Thanks to everyone for the roles you played in completing our first quilt. We appreciate the donations of fabric and material donations and use of sewing machines from Karen Bailey and Shirley Wilson, Lisa Wilcoxen, Reneau Diallo and Jacqueline Gipson. We thank Lisa Wilcoxen, Karen Bailey, Shirley Wilson, Jacqueline Gipson and Chris Malawy for providing leadership and/or technical assistance in pulling the quilt pieces together. We appreciate the donation of fabric blocks by the quilters, Historic K-Town and Kameryn Leonard. We thank BBF for in-kind donations of space, staff time, copies and use of computers.

We thank Dianna Long, of the Urban Art Retreat, for conducting quilting workshops for children and adults at her program site. She has 4 quilts underway, and has invited us to drop in and see the work in progress. Dianna may be contacted at

The URBAN ART RETREAT
1957 S. Spaulding Ave.
Chicago, Il. 60623
contact@urbanartretreat.com
www.urbanartretreat.com
(773) 542-9126
 http://www.urbanartretreat.com/

Status 

We are almost done with our first quilt. Constructing this quilt is giving us an opportunity to learn skills for developing what will be our cloth museum. We have pieced together the 9-patch blocks that the class made for practice a few weeks ago, and have pieced together the top and backing, inserted the batting, and have started knotting the 3 layers. Valerie Leonard will finish knotting the 3 outstanding 9-patches tonight, so that we can focus our efforts on binding tomorrow. When we're done binding, Karen will take the quilt and work with her apprentices later this week to crochet a decorative border.

Jacqueline Gipson has started a quilt honoring her father and other significant people and events in North Lawndale. Reneau Diallo has indicated that it is difficult for her to make it over to the West Side in the evenings, and has offered to work with a group of quilters who grew up in North Lawndale to produce a quilt.

Ashunti Community Services, Inc. has offered to assist in the development of a quilt and to host the celebration on their premises. We will explore this opportunity further. We will be scheduling one-on-one meetings with individuals and organizations that have expressed an interest in participating, but find Tuesday evenings inconvenient.

Next Steps

We should be done with the quilt tomorrow. Next week's meeting will be spent planning activities for the remainder of the project. We will select themes for individual rooms in our cloth museum. Each room will have its own theme, ie, journalists, schools, athletes, etc. We are asking each person to be responsible for completing at least one wall size quilt, of at least 24" x 24" by January 15th. Some people will be able to get their quilts done sooner. Those of us who have quilting experience will be on hand to help those of us who don't.

We hope to have a date set for our drive through quilting by the end of the week. We are looking at January 7th and/OR January 14th. Reneau Diallo has indicated that she would be willing to take the lead on this, sharing her experiences from the Quilt Pavilion at the African Festival of the Arts. If you have any questions, please e-mail Valerie F. Leonard, Project Manager, at consulting@valeriefleonard.com