‘Quilt lady,’ 83, brings warmth to the needy

loading...

MILBRIDGE – Gladys Hicks would give someone the quilt off her bed if she were asked.

The Milbridge woman, 83, has done that much and more.

From the West Manor Apartments, where she lives in elderly housing, she spends days and evenings making quilts. They are not the intricate, delicate sort that take months to produce. They are made quickly, for warmth and use by those who may have very little when they turn up at a homeless shelter.

She estimates that she has given away more than 200 quilts in the past three years. Her daughters believe the number is closer to 400.

“I haven’t kept count,” Hicks said.

Her quilts have been distributed in volume the past year to Catholic Charities in Portland, Manna Ministries in Bangor, a domestic violence shelter in Machias and a home for unwed mothers in Houlton.

She makes the quilts on her sewing machine as fast as friends give her fabrics for the tops and old blankets or mattress pads.

She doesn’t know the sources of all her material, because others living in her building just leave it outside her door.

“I’m known as the ‘quilt lady,'” she said.

For two hours a day, she cuts out squares as she watches television news. In her small living room, which has a view of Narraguagus Bay, she keeps piles of materials on hand to cut from when she wants a break from the sewing machine.

Her fabric pieces are random, and her favorite quilt design is the log cabin pattern around a larger center block. When she ends up with hundreds of leftover squares, she patches them together as a crazy quilt.

She figures she can make three or four quilts in a week – “if I can work steady and don’t have to go anywhere.”

Hicks is motivated simply by the idea of helping others, a lifelong creed.

“I had 15 brothers and sisters, and we were poor,” she said of growing up in Rhode Island. “Once I had a doll given to me with hair. I had it for a year before at the next Christmas my mother said we were giving the doll to my cousin, who had never had one. So I learned to share very young.”

She also learned to make quilts alongside her sisters.

“It was a way of life,” she said.

She moved to Milbridge in 2001 from Stratton in western Maine. There, too, she made quilts to help others, although not at the same level of productivity she manages today. If she heard of a family in need or people who had arrived in town with nothing, her contribution was quilts.

If she learned of newborns in the area, she provided baby quilts.

Now her daughters are also quilt makers. Gladys Bennett, in Stockton Springs, connected her to the Manna Ministries group, where a dozen of Hicks’ quilts cover beds in a women’s dormitory. Sue McCormick, in Portland, works for Catholic Charities. McCormick delivers close to 100 of her mother’s quilts each December to a homeless shelter on behalf of Catholic Charities.

She rarely hears from those who end up using her quilts but likes to read from a letter she received recently.

“I love the quilt,” the young woman in Portland wrote. “That is the first quilt someone gave me, and it is snug and warm. I will pass it on.”

Last year Hicks heard from a woman who helped out at the former Peaceful Choices women’s shelter in Machias. Hicks ended up making seven quilts for those beds, with the offer of making more if they were needed.

The woman returned to say she knew of two babies on the way.

“Come back in three days,” Hicks told her, then had two smaller quilts ready for the newborns.

Some of her quilts have made it as far as Brazil. Her oldest son, George Hicks of Bangor, is a missionary there four out of every five years.

She also has made enough quilts for all family members, including six children, 16 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Only rarely does Hicks keep one of her quilts for herself.

“Oh, I’ve got one on my bed, plus a fleece one if winter gets real cold.”