G
ARNETT — The Quilt Lady lives in a small house surrounded by trailer homes on a hill overlooking a lake. Inside, the house is dimly lit, the afternoon sun pressing softly against closed blinds.
Entering through the door nearest the carport, the Quilt Lady apologizes — unnecessarily — for the mess: “When I get to working on a quilt, everything else goes to pot. Come on in.”
As soon as the backdoor opens, Maggie, a small white tousle-haired mutt charges from the shadows, barking so furiously that her paws come off the ground with each yap. The Quilt Lady drives Maggie back, eventually trapping the dog in the master bedroom, the centerpiece of which is a lush purple and white quilt draped across the bed. “This is one I made last year. See?”
IN FACT, there’s barely a square inch of Oneda Grimes’ Garnett home that isn’t adorned with some item of her own design. Quilts slung over furniture. Quilt panels hanging from the wall. Her variegated curtains are hand-sewn. There’s an intricately-patterned cover draped over a side table. “That?” she says, “No, no. I got that at Goodwill.”
“THEY USED TO call me the Quilt Lady. My granddaughter was in Iola one day, at the doctor’s, and she was talking about her grandma and her quilts. And they said, ‘Oh, you mean the Quilt Lady?’
“Well,” Grimes says shyly, “Maybe I’m sort of well-known.”
She has a fair claim to that name. In 1994, a quilt she made — incorporating each of the state flags into a vertical pattern — was hung in the state capitol. After 9/11, Patriots Bank in Garnett chose to display the textile in its front lobby. “Because I put ‘United we stand’ at the bottom,” explains Grimes. Today, the piece is on view at a museum around the corner from her home.
ACROSS HER 74 years, Grimes figures she’s made 400 quilts. Most she gives away; some she sells; a handful have been exhibited in museums — in Lawrence, in Burlington, elsewhere.
So, does she see herself as an artist?
“I don’t,” insists Grimes. “To me, it’s just such fun.”
And yet her fixations are the same as any artist — she endeavors to reshape the raw contents of the material world into a pattern that meets the standards of her visual or poetic ideal.
“For me, I see a pattern and I think it has to be this and this and this. Then I’m not satisfied until I find this, this and this. When you put two pieces of fabric together, they don’t always match; you have to know if they go together. Well, I just think it has to be this color and this color and this color. And then I make it.
