“I want students to feel empowered, and I want them to feel capable of executing whatever it is that they want to do.”
It’s a simple statement from Daisy Aschehoug, delivered from her art studio in a converted hospital in Norway at an hour when most of North America is asleep. But like the curved seams she teaches—deceptively straightforward until you understand what they unlock—this philosophy represents something more radical than it first appears.
Aschehoug didn’t set out to revolutionize quilting education. She set out to survive.

Many Nested Curves 2021 Quilt by Daisy Aschehoug

The Moment Everything Changed

The turning point came with a quilt for QuiltCon 2017. Aschehoug had created challenge pieces she wanted to arrange in a traditional Lone Star pattern, but convinced herself it needed to be “modern” to fit the show. She consulted the Modern Quilting Guild website, checked off the tenets—asymmetrical, bold contrast, off the grid—and forced her work into someone else’s aesthetic.
It didn’t get into the show. More importantly, she was left with something she didn’t like.
“It didn’t reflect me. It reflected what I was trying to understand,” she explains. “I have said I am gonna make what I want to make, and if it fits, it fits, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Because it was more disappointing to have something I didn’t like than it was to not get in.”This became her artistic manifesto—and it extends directly into how she teaches.

Teaching What Can’t Be Owned

Aschehoug specializes in curved piecing, a technique that still carries trepidation despite becoming more common. She loves it when both students “who have never tried it before, and ones who have said, ‘That is so much easier now.’”
But here’s what sets her apart: she actively rejects the model where teachers brand every student creation or guard techniques as proprietary secrets.
"There are some teachers who won't teach certain techniques because they want to keep them as their own. I understand the need to keep some aspects of your work proprietary and to protect your technique so that you aren't replicated. But if I teach a technique and people feel empowered to use it, they'll inevitably use it in their own way. I don't mind if people copy me." 
Even when teaching with patterns, Aschehoug focuses on helping people understand how something works so they can do it again—their own way. “I always teach the convex piece goes down first, and the concave goes on top. But if you’re more comfortable doing it the other way, more power to you.”
This extends to the business model itself. Where some teachers exploit captive audiences with required handouts and materials upsells, Aschehoug arrives with stacks of printed patterns for students to use freely and take home. Everything extra is optional.
“Quilters pay for a workshop, and they usually end up paying a lot of money,” she notes. “I very intentionally want people to leave feeling like, "I totally got my money’s worth out of that class.'”

The Cost of Creative Independence

But Aschehoug is unflinchingly honest about what this life actually entails. When someone at a lecture announced plans to quit their job and become a full-time quilter, her immediate thought was: “Is it too late to get your job back?”
“Don’t do it,” she says bluntly. “I only do what I do because there was not another option that I really felt like was available to me.”
The reality is exhausting: updating websites, making products, fulfilling orders, creating content, managing contracts and materials lists. “I don’t know what the ratio is of time spent administratively versus creatively, but it is not 50-50. It is definitely far more administration than it is actually creating things.”
She works until 2 or 3 in the morning. She teaches workshops at 4 am to accommodate North American time zones. She wears every hat in a one-person business. “I am constantly wearing hats that I do not feel trained for or equipped for.”
Yet she’s building something meaningful. Her upcoming retreat at the Estelle Center for Creative Arts will feature new techniques she’s excited about: paper piecing within curved elements to achieve precision, methods for using scraps that look intentional rather than haphazard.

The Legacy of Empowerment

When Aschehoug brings her curved piecing workshop to the Estelle Center, participants won’t be learning a Daisy Aschehoug technique. They’ll be learning a centuries-old human technique that she happens to teach well. They won’t be required to make something that looks like her work. They’ll be gaining tools to make whatever they imagine.
“I want there to be as many amazing quilts in the world as there can possibly be,” she explains. 
This is teaching as liberation rather than replication. It’s rigorous skill-building that grants genuine freedom. Because Aschehoug learned the hard way that making what others expect leaves you with work you don’t love. And she learned through experience that the best teaching doesn’t create disciples—it creates artists capable of disappointing you beautifully by making something entirely their own.
Daisy Aschehoug’s Foundation Paper Curves quilting retreat will take place from June 15-19, 2026. Come ready not to learn the Daisy Aschehoug method, but to discover what becomes possible when someone hands you the tools and then steps out of your way.