Making beauty from beads gave reason to live

Woman's passion was Raleigh store

Melanie Haun strung together friends as easily as the beads she turned into necklaces and bracelets.

Those who shopped at her Raleigh store, Bead Delite, came for more than just the selection of supplies. They also came for the company.

"If you were a customer, you were a friend. That was Melanie," said Mary Hall, a regular at the store. "The first time I was in the store, I thought 'I could just stay here all day.' The atmosphere was awesome."

Some would come on their lunch hour, as much to chat and visit as to shop, calling ahead to see what they could bring Haun to eat.

"Mom wasn't a pushy salesperson," said her daughter, Kathy Carpenter. "She definitely had a personal interest in every customer. They would just sit and talk."

Haun died unexpectedly of an aneurysm in October, but her family and others are working to keep the store going as a memorial to her.

"She wanted local designers to have outlets for their creations," said Carolyn Williams, Haun's friend and the store's manager. "The community has already lost out because she has passed away. We don't want the beading and design community to lose any more."

Haun came to beading late in life, after a diagnosis of myasthenia gravis sent her into a period of depression.

For years before becoming ill, she had worked in advertising and, later, in education, first preschool then as an elementary school teaching assistant. In between, she was a stay-at-home mom.

"She always put our family first," Carpenter said. "No matter if she had to cancel something she'd been excited for, she always put others ahead of herself."

About five years ago, the Henderson native began having vision problems, said her husband, Harold. Soon, her face began to droop.

"It got to the point she had to hold her eye open to see," he said.

The myasthenia gravis diagnosis meant the doctors could prescribe medication to control the symptoms of the autoimmune disease. But it also sent the normally vibrant woman who had been looking forward to an active retirement into an emotional tailspin.

She had not had time to adjust to it mentally or emotionally," said Harold Haun of the disease's initial rapid progression. "She really sank into a deep depression."

His wife would sit in a chair and stair vacantly, he said. "That was just not her."

As a mix of 18 medications slowed her symptoms, Haun began exploring a long-held interest in crafting. She had tried beading before. Now she tried again, and this time it stuck. Her new passion pulled her out of her chair and replaced that vacant gaze with focus.

Opening the store

As her beading habit grew, she tried various venues to sell the jewelry she had created, but none of them seemed quite right. Her husband persuaded her to "reinvest" what she was creating; they took out a mortgage on their home which had been paid for with two teachers' salaries, and in 2006, Bead Delite opened.

"It gave my mom a reason to live. It got her excited," said her son, Michael Haun.

As well as providing a gathering place for customers and friends, the store also provided a place to display Haun's work, characterized by her ability to take beads that others rejected but that she saw potential in.

"She was all about second chances and trying again, and I guess that just went along with her design work," Carpenter said. "If a bead didn't work the first time, she paired it with something else."

"She could take some of the most God-awful looking beads and make something that was so exquisite," Hall said. "I was just in awe."

Williams said texture and color appealed to Haun. "She loved brilliant color and something different. If it was something she'd never seen before, we had to have it in the store."

One early order brought in a mix of beads, larger than cough drops and bumpy in hues of green, purple and brown, along with smaller, similarly colored rectangular beads. They didn't move until Haun started working with them.

"The ugly beads didn't sell until she made a sample with them," Williams said. "She'd turn around and make a masterpiece."

Haun's family is convinced that her work at the store bought her time.

During her last year and a half, "she saw her children find the people they were going to be with. She got to fulfill a dream and make people happy at the bead store," Michael Haun said.

Her death in October was unrelated to the myasthenia gravis, her family said. It came one month after her daughter's wedding. Since then, her husband has taken on some of her hours at the store, work he finds demanding.

"I don't know how she did it," he said.

Recently, he came across a box in their den containing 60 pounds of her creations that he hadn't known existed. They'll soon go on display at the store.

"We're going to put them up and call it Melanie's Wall," he said.

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Haun is survived by her husband, son, daughter, daughter-in-law and son-in-law.