A Pattern for Success : The Valley Quilt Assn. exhibit will include the work of a local craftswoman who has gained international fame for her skill at a centuries-old sewing art.

Local enthusiasts of American arts and crafts can look forward to setting out Saturday on a quilt trip.

One that promises to be “sew fine.”

The 300-member San Fernando Valley Quilt Assn. has its annual membership exhibit at the Cal State Northridge student union from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a fashion show of quilted clothing at 11 a.m. and a quilt auction at 1 p.m.

One of the exhibitors will be international quilting star Judy Mathieson of Woodland Hills. She’s a quilt show jurist and judge as well as a noted teacher and quilt maker herself.

In the ‘70s, Mathieson’s name was sewn into the fabric of the international quilting community--which today numbers in the millions--because of an error in judgment on her part.

“When I made my first quilt, I didn’t know what I shouldn’t have been able to do, so I did it anyway,” Mathieson says, laughing.

What happened is that in 1973 this graduate of the CSUN home economics department decided to make her first quilt and then proceeded to go about it logically. She figured that since she knew how to sew, what she should do was get a pattern book, select a pattern and just follow it, which is exactly what she did.

“I had no family history of quilting, so I didn’t know that certain patterns are considered so difficult as to be for experts only, and I didn’t know the pattern I’d chosen was definitely one of those,” she says.

The pattern was a Mariner’s Compass, an early 19th-Century design based on the tool early sailors used to chart their navigational paths before the advent of the magnetic compass.

It is an intricate, often wildly frustrating bit of geometric stitchery that includes a circle with 32 radiating points made up of hundreds of little pieces of material, a pattern that has probably caused more than one quilter to contemplate hara-kiri with her shears.

“After I made the quilt and started entering my work for consideration in national competitions, I gained instant status for successfully completing a Mariner’s Compass for my first effort,” Mathieson says.

Today she is considered an expert on the design.

The basic idea of quilts hasn’t changed since our founding mothers brought their quilting skills to the New World from France and England.

A bed quilt is two pieces of cloth sandwiching something warm in the middle, with the top piece being where the stitchery is showcased.

Although quilting has faded into and out of national popularity, it has experienced a renaissance since the 1976 Bicentennial, according to quilting guru Bonnie Leman.

Leman is the founder and editor of the 25-year-old, 225,000-subscriber Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine, considered to be a bible of the quilting industry.

Her little newsletter, born on the family kitchen table in Pennsylvania, grew into a powerful publishing industry serving the quilting population, which Leman estimates at about 15 million in the United States today.

Mathieson is a happy example of someone who started quilting for fun, only to have her hobby turn a profit.

These days she commands upward of $1,000 to lecture or teach on the craft, and she has recently conducted seminars in Sacramento, Redlands, Victorville, Reno, Houston and Dallas, with a June date in Scotland and one in Tokyo in October.

She has become such an authority on the Mariner’s Compass design that in 1986 C & T Publishing in Lafayette, Calif., put out a workbook containing some of Mathieson’s variations on the design appropriately called “Mariner’s Compass, An American Quilt Classic” ($15.95). A second edition is due out this fall.

She also has other designs for quilts and wearable quilting that she sells by mail. And she’s made hundreds of quilts over the years to commemorate special times for her family and friends.

Her husband, Jack, a retired computer software executive, has become a professional quilt photographer, and he assists his wife in creating new patterns by drawing and manipulating designs on a home computer.

Judy says what he does is nothing a person with a piece of graph paper, ruler and a compass couldn’t do.

Easy for her to say.

One of Mathieson’s more recent works is a Mariner’s Compass design that pushes the envelope on the classic, so that mariners would probably never recognize it.

It is called “Epicenter” and memorializes Mathieson’s emotional landscape after last year’s January jolt as clearly as if she had painted it in oils.

Its strident, jangling colors and off-center star will speak to anyone who experienced the shaking.

Mathieson and the rest of the quilters will speak Saturday to anyone who is interested in knowing more about the craft.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: The San Fernando Valley Quilt Assn. exhibit.

Location: Cal State Northridge Student Union, 18111 Nordhoff St. Directions available at any CSUN kiosk.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Price: $5.

Call: (818) 885-3644.

Spielberg’s Bee Movie Quilting has become a cash cow for many who started out just wanting to keep themselves in stitches.

Quilting magazines, books, paraphernalia, trends, trappings, shows, competitions, retrospectives, clubs, bees and what-have-you have sprung up all over.

It is a trend alert that has even caught the eye of uber mogul Steven Spielberg.

His Amblin Entertainment is making a film, due out in December, of the bestseller “How to Make An American Quilt,” by Whitney Otto. It’s about a young woman during a difficult time in her life who finds comfort and guidance in her grandmother’s quilting circle.

Disabuse yourself immediately if you think this is some sort of low-budget artsy film that will appear in three cities and then disappear into the Arts & Entertainment channel forever.

Just check out the cast list:

In addition to Winona Ryder, who plays the young woman, there is Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Capshaw, Melinda Dillon, Kate Nelligan, Esther Rolle, Jean Simmons, Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard.

If just the estimated 15 million quilters in America see it, it should come out in the black.