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Too weak to work because of her breast cancer treatments, Joan Shuler started stringing stones and crystals into necklaces to stay busy.
Her twin sister, recovering from her own successful battle with breast cancer, picked up the hobby while providing support.
More than a decade later, what started as a diversion from disease has become a growing jewelry business, transforming a family curse into a blessing for the twins.
Not only are Shuler and her sister, Jan McMullen, cancer free, their jewelry is selling at 35 stores from New Orleans to Hilton Head to the White Rabbit Cottage in Marietta. They recently spent $15,000 to produce 400 samples for traveling sales reps, and they donate 10 percent of their profits to breast cancer research.
"Our illness is so yesterday," said Shuler over a cup of coffee and warm apple bread in her Marietta kitchen.
Their studio is in the living room --- actually, just some folding tables overflowing with strings of bangles and beads and jewels, propped among antique tables and chairs.
Their brightly colored necklaces and bracelets sell particularly well in resort gift shops, the sisters said. People say the strings of shells, pearls and polished stones remind them of their vacations in these beautiful places.
That evocation of nature was very much what Shuler was hoping for when she started making the jewelry during her first bout with cancer, when the hobby replaced her walks along the Kennesaw Mountain trails behind her home, and when her garden fell untended.
Both sisters had feared cancer, knowing it had struck generations of women in their family. "It was the family plague," Shuler said.
McMullen was struck first in the early 1990s. After about nine months of radiation and chemotherapy, she learned she was cancer free in the same week Shuler's mass was diagnosed as malignant.
"I knew exactly what was in store," Shuler said, having supported her sister. "I had held her hand and walked her through it."
The double-barrelled treatment of chemotherapy and radiation laid her, in her own words, flat on her back. Creating necklaces became a hobby for the woman who lost her job as a corporate recruiter, and who now found herself unable to concentrate on TV or magazines. She soon shared the new hobby with her sister.
Joan and Jan have always shared everything. They had cut out paper dolls together as children, joined Tri Delta sorority at the University of Georgia, carried the same major of home economics, and planned a double ceremony when they married in 1985.
"Anything that Joan is into, I'm into," McMullen said. That connection carried into the rough times. "When she was sick, I felt a part of me was sick."
Having husbands whose work often took them out of town, the sisters leaned hard on one another through the nausea and night sweats. McMullen relocated from Florida to Cobb County, where her sister lived. And their jewelry-making served as a bond and a diversion, something they could do to pass the time, to keep the depression of illness from gaining ground.
They passed some necklaces to friends.
Years went by before Shuler suffered her second bout of cancer in 1997. And when McMullen went through an even more serious cancer diagnosis in 2001, Shuler was there for her.
"It was my turn to carry the load," Shuler said. She watched over her sister's two teenage boys, cooking meals and cleaning the house. "I had to almost move in."
When McMullen was too sick for just about anything, the jewelry-making became something to look forward to. Starting again was a sign of progress.
"That's when I knew I was well," McMullen said.
Over the years, friends told others about the jewelry, and the word passed to store keepers.
Now the twins --- Shuler is the elder by six minutes --- work every day at growing their business, which they call Twin Creation. They have their own Web site: www.twincreation.com.
Their similarities help drive their cottage industry. They're both 5-foot-2 blondes, age 49, with smiles built for a Crest commercial. Both have lilting Southern accents. The way to tell them apart, they tell people, is that Joan has slightly longer hair and a slightly longer name than Jan.
But it's their differences, they say, that cement their collaboration. Shuler is more creative, spending hours experimenting with different combinations of stones and beads to create a just-perfect piece.
McMullen is the pragmatic one, keeping her feet firmly on the pedals that drive the business. She deals with sales representatives, stocks up on supplies and handles the attorney and accountant.
She's told her more imaginative sister, "If you were an employee of mine, I'd have fired you a thousand times."
Shuler acknowledges, "If we're not together, we don't create as well."
The sisters hope their success inspires others fighting cancer. But they don't dwell on the past. They're wrapped up in where it has led them, busily preparing for a big jewelry show in January. They've even hired a firm to help them reproduce their most popular creations. Their prices range from $12 for a pair of crystal and pearl earrings to $80 for a triple-strand necklace of turquoise and coral.
"I know many people would look at us and say we've gone through so much," McMullen said. "But I count so many blessings."
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
