Helen Mar Parkin is a retired conservator of paintings who discovered rug hooking in 2011. In 2018 she completed the McGown Teacher Training program to become a certified rug hooking teacher. While she started with wide cut primitives, Helen Mar now gravitates more toward fine cuts, fine shading, and pictorials. Her work has appeared on the cover of Rug Hooking Magazine and she is a member of the Celebration Hall of Fame.

Shown here is Helen Mar’s version of Jane McGown Flynn’s Canadian Snow Geese, completed in 2019. The assignment for this Show and Tell rug was that it must be hooked in a monochromatic palette, which presented an interesting challenge. The most fun came from creating a back story for the rug. The geese cannot find food in the frozen fields and must fly south ahead of the approaching storm.

A resident of east Texas, Helen Mar participates in and teaches at several rug hooking groups in Dallas, Arlington, and Mineola. She is a member of ATHA, the Texas Rug Runners ATHA chapter, and the National Guild of Pearl K. McGown Rug Hookrafters. Her interests outside rug hooking include shelving books at the local library and serving weekly on a hotline to help injured and orphaned wild animals.

Here is Helen Mar's version of a fairy tale rug hooking pattern, designed by Melissa and Isabella Pattacini. This rug toured the country as part of the Golden Age of Fairy Tales Rug Hooking Exhibition, launched in 2023.