Esther Frenzel is a free motion quilting teacher who specialises in intermediate to advanced quilting designs. She quilts on a domestic sewing machine and a longarm and teaches online using both machines. Her designs range from edge to edge designs, grid design and border designs like ribbon candy and wishbone.
Esther is a high school teacher with 25 years of experience in the south of the Netherlands, Europe. She works in a Dutch bilingual high school where she teaches various art classes to students between the ages of 12 to 18.
How did you find yourself on an artist’s path? Always there? Lightbulb moment? Dragged kicking and screaming? Evolving? / How did you get into fiber art? Why?
As a teenager I planned to get into art restoration, archaeology or museum work. One of the requirements of being able to pursue that career was having an art teaching degree. At art school (1995-1999) I discovered that I was also very interested in the textile department with their fabulous textile experiments and impressive looms. It was so incredible tempting, but I decided to stay on track with the teaching degree. When I look back at my art work from those four years, I see the beginning of a quilt designer. An eye for patterns, use of grids and adding technical aspects to my art. In the end I didn’t go into art restoration, but found my joy in the high school classroom, which may have been my destination all along.
And that love for pattern, fabrics and experiments ‘popped’ up again around 2011-2012 when I tried quilting for the first time with a book I found in my favorite bookstore. I am very thankful that the moment coincided with the explosion of the internet and the birth of QuiltCon. Quilting is a relatively uncommon hobby where I live and I didn’t know anybody who could teach me. I was, and still am, thankful for all the beautiful quilts on Flickr, all the YouTube videos explaining techniques and patterns and the wonderful blogpost people compose with ‘linky parties’ where we could come together and share our projects. Once I discovered the existence of longarm machines, I vowed to myself that one day I would own one of them. A fascination was born!
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As an art instructor, you teach and work across a variety of mediums. Which are your top three favorites?
I have been teaching art in a high school for over 25 years and I try to expose my teenage students to many different materials and techniques. I personally don’t really have a favourite material or technique for the lessons that I teach there.
I do love it when there is time for experiments and using or combining materials in a new and creative way. Besides all the craft or skill-based lessons, I really enjoy teaching art history which encompasses visual arts, dance, theatre, music and film. I enjoy seeing the students’ eyes light up when we speak about art from long ago and how it is or isn’t different from current art developments.
In my quilting, I love working with quilting cotton (Fat Quarter blenders mostly) and cotton and wool batting. I am most definitely a fan of polyester threads as I am in general a fast quilter and the threads need to be able to keep up with me 
In the past I have worked with some vintage fabrics for zipper pouches and bags and such and I really enjoyed that. I am looking forward to starting a wholecloth on a vintage tablecloth that found a while ago.
Within the wide variety of quilting techniques, I really love the foundation paper piecing technique and regular patchwork. I sometimes play with a trapunto technique when I want to emphasize a certain shape in the quilting. But overall, I am most in love with the actual quilting: adding threads, in all the bright colours!
In general I like denser quilting, but that is because most of those pieces are wallhangings and not quilts for cuddling. I also love to play around with rulers on the longarm machine.
When you have time to work on something for yourself, do you plan your work out ahead of time? Or do you just dive in with your materials and start playing?
It totally depends on what I am working on.
If it is a personal project, I tend to have some of the things planned out before I start, like the patchwork pattern and color scheme. I do tend to wing it with the fabric selection as I prefer to buy Fat Quarters for lots of variety. That does mean I have to be creative with my stash and scraps to get to the requirement amount of fabric. The actual free motion quilting plan often develops while I am piecing the project.
If I am working on a business project, like for a pattern or class that I am creating, everything is planned ahead. It gives me peace of mind to know that when I am able to work on such a project I can just go, go, go!
What inspires you to create?
I think the word ‘discover’ best describes the reason why I create. I love to design new free motion designs, or come up with original patchwork or foundation paper piecing patterns. It’s like solving a complex puzzle.
Teaching my designs though my online courses and providing tutorials on my blog is so much fun! I hope that my creations will help others also find joy in quilting, like I have. There is joy in discovery “just for me” and the joy in sharing the discovery with other creatives.
Describe your creative space.
When I started quilting I used the second bedroom in my apartment as a sewing room. It was really small but it worked.
I dreamed about owning a longarm machine which meant that I would have to move to a bigger house. It took me two years to find a house with a big enough room and I am very glad that I waited for the right house.
Houses tend to only have one big bedroom here in the Netherlands. My attic has a very steep roof allowing for a small mezzanine that I use for storage and a large dormer window.
The attic’s floorspace is taken up by two desks for the sewing machine and the computer stuff, several cabinets and of course the longarm machine. The only thing that I miss in that room are straight walls so I could add a bigger design wall.
There are windows on both sides of the attic, which I find essential. I need to be able to see outside and feel the sunshine. Maybe in my next house I will have a craft room that opens up to the garden.
Working across many different media, how do you organize all of your creative supplies?
Ah, the danger zone! Creative minds like us are interested in so many techniques and materials, which inevitably results in an overload of supplies. I have been a collector of craft supplies for years, and it was overwhelming me. So much so that I even contemplated buying an even bigger house to store everything. It wasn’t a lack of space, just lack of decision making, ha ha!
This summer, I overhauled the sewing room. I had to get real with myself, was I ever going to use this material? Would I ever want to try that technique? Do I really need to store all these extra tools? Would I ever want to spend time finishing that old project? I was tough on myself and was able to donate a lot (charity, art room at work, etc).
My sewing room is not only my place of creativity but also a place where I am building my business. I try to keep it organised as I would in my classroom at school. I have also told myself not to use the flat surfaces or the floor as storage, meaning everything has to fit on the shelves or in the cupboards. Overflow will not be permitted anymore to safeguard my sanity, ha ha.
Scraps. Saver? Or be done with them?
Yes, I save my scraps, anything over 1.5 inches I tend to keep. I separate them by color. Quilting fabric is pretty expensive here in Europe, so I try to use as much of the fabrics as I can.
This year I am making an effort to use as much of these scraps as I possibly can and try to limit my fabric purchases to essentials only. I started 4 different projects using mostly scraps in the hope that by December I have gone through all of the separate scrap boxes.
One of these projects is piecing small baby quilts for the NICU in the local hospital. I hope to have two of the other bigger projects done by the end of January. And that last one, will probably be a project that I will keep adding blocks to for the whole of next year.
How often do you start a new project? Do you work actively on more than one project at a time?
I have several projects on the go. Most get finished, some projects I consider learning projects. Not every idea turns out to be great so I don’t mind that I have to take some things apart or repurpose them. I really love that I can select a project to match my energy at the moment. Sometimes I just want to do free motion, other times I want to do simple piecing or just sorting through and petting fabric. I think it is healthy to allow for that variety.
How has your creativity evolved over the years? What triggered the evolution to new media/kinds of work/ways of working?
As a new quilter I found the foundation paper piecing patterns very interesting and fun to design. I have done that for a couple of years as a hobby.
My attention has shifted more and more to free motion quilting and teaching classes on this technique. First in local sewing machine or quilting shops, but since this year I have expanded into online classes.
My business is very new and I am still figuring things out. So far it brings me lots of fun and interaction with other quilters.
You post a new tutorial on machine quilting each week. Where do you find your inspiration for your designs?
I go through phases in my quilting business.
When I am in a sketching phase, I work on my iPad mostly to draw out ideas. I try to create a lots of variations of a design to discover its possible difficult elements, or possible additions. I tend to bring the iPad everywhere with me so I can sketch to pass the time, like at the hair salon or in the train.
Sometimes I start with a basic design as the starting point like a stipple design. Other times I try to imitate a certain shape like a cloud or flower or a theme like the ocean. In general I make an effort to create a variation of types of designs; edge to edge, border designs, grid patterns or small background fillers.
There have been occasions that I have found great quilting in art history books or documentaries. Inspiration is all around.
What do you do to keep yourself motivated and interested in your work?
Some weeks I work on creating quilting classes or preparing the social media posts. Other weeks I work on a just-for-me projects. Switching between these keeps me interested in all the different aspects of quilting.
Most of the business quilting is done during the vacation periods of my day job, and I make an effort to batch my tasks. I am glad that I don’t have to go through the process of recording, editing or photographing every single week. That just puts way too much pressure on me and I wouldn’t be able to be consistent with my content.
When you have time to create for yourself, what kinds of projects do you make?
I love creating quilty projects for my house, with wall quilts as my absolute favorite. There are still a few walls in the house that I can still fill with color and fun designs. I like to add some seasonal wall quilts, we all need some variation, right?! I love adding color and pattern to my house, especially in the darker months of the year. I also enjoy making pillows and baby quilts as gifts.
Tell us about your blog and website. What do you hope people will gain by visiting?
I hope people will discover some fresh free motion designs that spark their interest in learning more designs. Lots of the FMQ books and classes show the same designs over and over, which is fine. Seeing how a different teacher approaches the same design is a great way to learn, but there comes a time that you just would like to try something new.
I try to offer new and fresh ideas for intermediate to advanced quilters. That means lots of variation or more complex additions. I love coming up with new designs and I hope others will love using them. When I started learning to quilt, I looked at so many YouTube videos and any books on free motion quilting that I could find. I want to ‘pay it forward’ for all those other quilters who shared their knowledge.
Besides that I want to let people see that their is more to quilting that just a quick stipple. Quilting can add so much to your quilt.
Where can people see your work?
I share my designs and quilts on my blog which I link to Youtube. I also share all of it to Instagram and provide some exclusive material for the newsletter subscribers. I am also on Facebook, but I prefer to use Instagram.
Blog: https://ipatchandquilt.wordpress.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ipatchandquilt
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ipatchandquilt/
Newsletter: https://ipatchandquilt.myflodesk.com/d9j3ep8vgb
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esther.ipatchandquilt/
Pinterest: https://nl.pinterest.com/ipatchandquilt/
Interview posted November 2024
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