VENTURA : Just Call Her the Martha Stewart of Moorpark

Moorpark homemaker Linda Kapigian is the Ventura County Fair’s duchess of domestic arts. Even she says so.

She bakes. She sews. She quilts. She knits. She makes little doodads for holiday gifts. This year, she got into gift baskets--those cellophane-wrapped presents stuffed with cookies, embroidered hand towels, candles, preserved jams--all handmade, of course.

And you can search hard, but don’t expect to ever find a slipped stitch or a crumbly cookie, say her awed competitors in the fair’s Creative Living hall.

“Everything she does is perfect,” said Mary Barton of Oxnard, a clerk in the department. “What I want to know is, when does she sleep?”

Good question. Kapigian is this year’s sweepstakes winner in the baked goods contest, having entered about 70 breads, cookies and cakes. She also swept the clothing and textiles division, scoring over 100 points more than her closest competitor.

And she might have won arts and crafts too, but didn’t qualify because she was the sweepstakes winner last year, said Valerie Ulmer, superintendent of Creative Living.

Kapigian says it’s no big deal--she just likes the challenge of creating beautiful things and entering them into competition.

“For the past five years, I wanted to be the Queen of Everything,” she said.

Kapigian, 47, grew up on a Simi Valley ranch. She became a perfectionist by watching her mother create things at home, she said.

“Her stitches were always meticulous,” she said. “She would find something wrong in a sweater and rip out five rows of knitting.”

When Kapigian left her job as a physical therapist nine years ago to take care of her son, David, she began entering a few cookies, breads and crafts into fair competition.

The things she didn’t know how to do, like making lace by hand and making rolls, she taught herself, Kapigian said.

But it wasn’t until 1992 that she really kicked into high gear.

She won her first sweepstakes that year, taking a second place in clothing and textiles. In 1993, she won first place in both the baked goods and clothing and textiles divisions, and last year, she won arts and crafts and placed second in baked goods.

“I know what this is,” said Sandra, a Camarillo woman who was inspecting Kapigian’s prize-winning baby christening gown on display at the fair Monday. “It’s the Martha Stewart syndrome. I think she should move up to a bigger fair.”

Even Kapigian seems to recognize that it is time to move onto something else. She will end her reign after this year’s fair, she said.

“This isn’t something a sane person does,” she said. “Part of me is proud and part of me says I could have done it better. It gets to be an obsessive-compulsive thing.”