From afar, the quilt that Stephanie Obusek is sewing looks staid and demure, a pretty pastel pattern of pink and yellow.

But up close, the personality of a 17-year-old emerges in rectangles patterned with hearts and pop art-ish red lips.

It sounds unlikely, but quilting is downright hip these days at Elizabeth Forward High School.

"It's kind of an old-fashioned process, but they don't turn out old-fashioned necessarily," said 18-year-old senior Kallyn Westfall, assembling squares for a brightly-colored quilt for her twin sister. "You can make them modern."

Stephanie was making the king-sized, pink-and-yellow quilt for herself, but has already made a quilt for her niece, one for her boyfriend (with racing stripes) and one for charity.

"Clothes get old, but stuff like this will always be around," said Stephanie, folding up her massive 108-inch-by-108-inch, king-sized quilt during eighth-period sewing class. "I've got my next two quilts lined up already."

The quilting bug was hatched by sewing teacher Rebecca Fest, who has spent years stitching together the hobby with hundreds of students at Elizabeth Forward.

Mrs. Fest, who has taught on and off in Allegheny County since 1970, first helped a student make a quilt about 15 years ago when the student requested it. But she never thought that quilting would catch on with teenagers en masse.

"Nothing is hard, but quilting is tedious," said Mrs. Fest. "My mom tried to teach me, but I wasn't interested. I was all about clothes."

Once the first few students had finished products to show off, however, everyone wanted a quilt. Now, Mrs. Fest can't offer enough sewing classes to meet demand (she already teaches five classes per day) and parents come up to her on back-to-school night asking how they can get their kids into her class.

"The boys make them, everybody's crazy to make them," she said. "The mothers want them in the class so bad because they want a quilt."

Students will show off at least 60 quilts made on sewing machines as part of the school's annual Art and Technology Fair from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. today at the school.

Mrs. Fest tries to start the students off small, with relatively simple quilt patterns such as "nap time" or "gumdrops."

Sam Hrehocik, a 17-year-old senior, is now creating her own patterns after sewing four different quilts, including a Green Bay Packers quilt for her boyfriend. "I was never interested in sewing," she said. "I took this class and ended up liking it after the first quilt."

Students also make smaller quilts to donate to Project Linus, which supplies blankets to children through hospitals and social service agencies.

For their personal quilts, the students buy and use their own fabric. One student made a traditional quilt out of fabric from the 1930s that her mother had bought.

It was during the 1930s that quilting saw its last real heyday in the United States, as women gathered scraps for patchwork quilts during the Great Depression.

Quilting and other domestic arts declined during the 1960s and 1970s, with the movement of women into the work force and the easy availability of commercially produced linens.

In recent years in Pittsburgh, however, there's been something of a resurgence. Johanna Blanarik, owner of Piecing it Together in Ross, said that when she bought the store 12 years ago it was one of only four quilt stores in the region. Now, she said, there are more than 20 stores.

Still, the average age of her customers is about 45 and very few of them are teenagers, she said.

Kim Cornelissen, a 16-year-old junior at Elizabeth Forward, is a clear exception. She loves fabric shopping and has accumulated "a ridiculous amount of fabric" at her house -- some of which she was cutting out for a "puzzle quilt" in shades of magenta.

Sewing class is the one part of her day that she always looks forward to, she said, and she likes the idea of someday being able to pass her quilts down to her children.

Mrs. Fest has a dry sense of humor and a palpable affection for her students, who tend to come into the sewing room during free periods or during lunch to get advice on matters involving quilting or anything else under the sun.

When Mrs. Fest floats the idea of staying after school to finish up quilts before the Art and Technology Fair, the majority of her students express an interest. When she says that she can stay late because her husband is out of town, the students start giggling over the idea of a quilting slumber party.

"She treats us like adults instead of like children," said Amanda Jacobs, a 17-year-old senior who sat down as a freshman and figured out how to schedule her classes so that she could have Mrs. Fest as a teacher every year.

Amanda, who will attend Penn State University next year, decorated her bedroom around a pink, beige and green quilt that she'd made for herself. Once she finishes a quilt for her mother composed of various apple prints, she plans to move on to her little brothers.

"My brothers are six and nine years younger than me, and they're like, 'I want to take sewing, too,'" she said. "They've already been fighting about who gets their quilt made first."