The Yuppie Quilting Bee : Pastimes: Regional guilds are crowded with young professional women who are interested in the traditional American art of stitching elaborate designs.

By day, Cyndi Wideman, a 29-year-old Northridge resident, is a stylishly dressed service director at a professional legal planning company. Her friend, Marilyn George, 34, of Chatsworth, is an outgoing single woman who travels the country as an auditor for Blue Cross. Another friend, Triva Ponder, 29, of Van Nuys, became a mother two months ago and left her job as a magazine editor.

But one night a week, they get together with pins, patches and razor-sharp scissors and call themselves the Friday Night Strippers.

Stripping is a quilting term--cutting material into long pieces--and these women get together on Friday nights to help each other quilt. They are also part of a growing number of young professional women who have become interested in the traditional American art of designing and stitching elaborate covers.

The Southern California Council of Quilt Guilds lists 45 clubs; one of the biggest in the region is the 300-member San Fernando Valley Quilt Assn., which has 100 more women waiting to join. The Valley Quiltmakers Guild is another local group that meets in the daytime and has more than 200 members. Other large quilt associations meet monthly in Glendale, Simi Valley, the Santa Clarita Valley, Ventura County and the Antelope Valley.

Pilgrims brought with them the practice of sewing layered material together to make warm bedcovers. It became a uniquely American art form when the pioneers cut fabric into little pieces and arranged them into decorative patchwork patterns. Because each quilt often took hundreds of hours of tedious stitching, women helped each other in quilting bees that also became important social gatherings.

A quilt revival started in the 1960s and again during the 1976 Bicentennial. Recent concern about the environment has turned some women toward practical, back-to-basics, home-oriented hobbies such as quilting, said Pat Scoville, president of the San Fernando Valley Quilt Assn., which is the largest in the Valley.

“Now we are seeing younger women join who are realizing the advantages of networking with women of all generations, cultures and economic backgrounds,” said Scoville, who has quilted for 12 years. It’s still primarily a woman’s hobby, but mini-groups like the Friday Night Strippers can no longer be pigeonholed as consisting of only a certain type of woman. They are young and old, single and married, white, black, Latino and Asian.

“We’re not all white-haired homemakers,” said Wideman, who made a point of discussing her Friday night quilting sessions on a video that she made for a dating service she joined. It hasn’t cramped her social life; in fact, she has many more close friends.

At a recent Friday session with 14 friends, Wideman was at her sewing machine sipping a Diet Coke and wearing a tight black outfit. She modeled an intricate full-figured quilted bustier she had designed. “People say, ‘Well, you don’t look like a quilter,’ ” Wideman said with a smile, pulling out a large unfinished quilt with 108 different pieces of fabric cut and combined to look like her pet poodle. “To me, it’s a fun way of expressing my creativity. We get together to stitch and bitch.”

“It’s kind of group therapy; we talk about personal problems,” added George, who said they gripe to each other about their dates, husbands, bosses, children and grandchildren, as well as discussing the latest store sales and world events. George has an estimated 4,000 pieces of quilt hidden in every closet, trunk and spare drawer in her two-story condominium--and they’re all some shade of purple, her favorite color. George makes wall hangings and bed quilts for friends and family, but said “some friends my age think I’m crazy.”

“It shocked my friends when I told them I quilt, but they’re interested after I show them what I’ve created, even my very hip cousin with the spiked purple hair,” said Ponder, who started quilting last summer after she became pregnant, quit her job and grew bored. Although she had no sewing expertise, she wanted to make a baby pillow out of neon-colored fabric, so she took a quilting class and got hooked.

“I always wrap my baby in a quilt when I go to my Jane Fonda postnatal exercise class, and the other women ask, ‘Oh, where did you get the quilt?’ and they’re so impressed when I say, ‘I made it,’ ” Ponder said. “I tell you, making the quilt was a lot harder than making the baby.”

Less than two months after giving birth to her daughter, Ponder was back at her Friday night quilting bee. Not only does she get advice about quilting but also learns the tricks of motherhood from older members. “This is a sorority of sisters, aunts and moms that filled the gap for me in the transition from college to real life,” Ponder said.

The oldest Friday Night Stripper, Kitty Wong, is a 55-year-old grandmother from Northridge who met the others in a class. “They’re a lot like my daughters and they take care of me, but I don’t treat them like my daughters; they are my friends,” Wong said.

Hawaiian-born Yolanda Puckett, 45, of Chatsworth has had help with the complex pattern for her detailed quilt from executives at Litton Industries, where she works in business development. But it’s her quilt group that cheers her on to continue the project that may take years.

“I thought it was too complicated for me,” Puckett said. “I’m doing it all by hand, and everyone here encourages my progress week to week.”

Making a quilt for her brother, who is fighting in Saudi Arabia, Marion Ziegler is being helped by her friend Donna Grubb. Ziegler, who is white, carries an antique black Singer sewing machine to the quilting bees and Grubb, who is black, carries an identical machine that is white. Ziegler lives in San Fernando and Grubb lives nearby in Arleta, but if it weren’t for their mutual interest in quilting, they perhaps would never have developed such a binding friendship.

“It’s a comforting way to spend time,” Grubb said.

“It’s a good way to spend time with friends,” Ziegler added.

“It’s a good way to spend money too,” said Jerry Ziegler, her husband, who sometimes attends the bees and often provides the male perspective on issues that the women discuss.

With special $2,000 sewing machines, $100 irons and fabric that costs up to $20 a yard, quilting can get expensive. Some of the women have had to distract husbands while wives hide hundreds of dollars worth of material in trunks or trash bags throughout the house.

“Some of our husbands would probably kill us if they knew how much we spend on material,” joked Nancy Ryba, 42, of Granada Hills, a quilter for 12 years who has been known to chat and quilt with friends until dawn. “But most husbands support it because they see it as an old-fashioned art form, and it gives us a chance to do some old-fashioned gossiping.”

Quilters meet at one of about 10 fabric stores in the Valley that offer quilting classes. The only store devoted solely to the hobby is the Quilt Emporium in Woodland Hills. Owner Linda Higgins sells tons of fabric, about 200 books and has 10 teachers giving classes to an increasing number of younger customers.

Higgins has a group of friends who have met at each other’s houses every other Monday for the past 10 years and call themselves Loose Threads. At a recent meeting, they each brought a handmade patch as a contribution to a friendship quilt for Lorraine Vincent, who asked that each woman design some type of house and sign it. Kathy Hill, who collects birdhouses, made a birdhouse. Fran Carter, who has three sons, made three tepees. Alice Crandall made a log cabin; Chris Webber made an outhouse, and Judy Mathieson, a frequent traveler and quilt book author, made a patch with a motor home on it.

“People today are more aware of their heritage and, when we work together like this, it is like we have a piece of each other’s friendship in these quilts,” Vincent said.

“These days, you don’t know who lives next door anymore and you don’t meet people through your children because no one goes to neighborhood schools,” said Marlene Peterman, a Scot who moved to Woodland Hills. “I’ve had friends in this group for 10 years, and we’ve been through all sorts of problems together.”

Carole Waite of Westlake Village said she drove her mother to quilt meetings for years and then became interested herself. Quilting became a mother-daughter. “She was proud of me for giving her four grandchildren, but I think she was more proud that I became a quilter,” Waite said. Her mother, Vera Cummings, died three years ago but not before the group made a friendship quilt for her 80th birthday.

Fran Carter of Palmdale got pinned to the hobby after her mother, Peggy Thompson, kept giving each family member colorful quilted pillows. Carter, born in Van Nuys, said: “Even my sister, who I guess you could describe as a 25-year-old yuppie, is intrigued about it.”

Loose Threads does charity work, including sewing 10,000 yellow bows that were sent with comedian Bob Hope to the troops in Saudi Arabia to “wear on their skivvies” or for bookmarks, said Shirley Sydow of Canoga Park. Members are making a quilt to be auctioned at the San Fernando Valley Quilt Assn.’s annual fund-raising Quilt Faire on May 18 at Cal State Northridge. Proceeds from the event will pay for operating expenses and a scholarship for a CSUN textile student.

This year, Wideman, who is one of the newest and youngest quilters in the association, is in charge of the event. The theme is “Something Old and Something New.”