Mara has always loved creating with fiber, from knit socks to hand-bound books. She took her first piecing class in 2001 with the amazing Deb Tucker, and soon the knitting needles and spinning wheel were gathering dust, the pieces of a new jacket sat folded in a basket, never to be assembled. She pieced half a dozen tops in the first few months but could not bring herself to send them away to be quilted by someone else. With Deb’s encourage- ment, she began investigating longarms, and in 2003, Flying Goose Custom Quilting opened in the guest bedroom.

Several years later, Mara met the HQ Fusion® at a quilt show, and it was love at first stitch. This was a friendly machine. A machine that was designed to make quilting easy. A machine that would take her to the next level. And it did.

In 2009 she became aa Handi Quilter retailer, added two HQ Avanté® machines to her studio, no longer in the spare bedroom, and began to offer hands-on classes and rentals so that anyone could have the opportunity to finish their own quilts. In response to the frequent customer query, “How do you know what to quilt?” she developed a popular workshop to guide quilters step by step in
developing a design to make each of theirtops shine.

Mara’s quilts have been recognized at regional and national shows, both her solo work and especially those quilts created with designer and quilt judge Kathie Beltz. She always begins by conceiving of a quilt that she doesn’t know how to make. When the quilt iscomplete, she is always wiser and sometimes quite a bit older.