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