YouTube star Melanie Ham, known for her crafting videos, dead after cancer battle
Melanie Ham, whose YouTube videos about crocheting, quilting and crafting racked up millions of views, died at age 36 after a battle with cancer, her husband announced.
“If you’ve been following our journey I’m sure you were, like us, hopeful she could defeat this insidious disease,” Ham’s husband, Robert, wrote in an Instagram post earlier this month.
“Over the past few months things have been progressively getting worse and we’re thankful that we made it to this point through the holidays and tried to make every moment count.”
Ham announced in a 2020 blog post that she was diagnosed with a rare condition within the “Sarcoma family of cancers” after previously having her left kidney and a benign massed removed.
“It behaves differently than a typical cancer which is why it was so unpredictable, and now that it’s back it’s officially cancer (no longer ‘benign’),” Ham wrote at the time. “Of course the Covid-19 crisis makes this even more complicated to navigate.”
Ham died less than two weeks before the couple’s 16th wedding anniversary, her husband wrote.
“My family, our doctors, our nurses and especially Melanie fought until the end and did all we could do to avoid today, but that s not our path,” Robert wrote in the announcement. “Let me reassure all those rooting for us, Melanie fought like a warrior queen.”
Ham regularly earned tens to thousands of views with her YouTube videos — and sometimes exceeded a million views on individual posts — on an account that has 812,000 subscribers.
Her most popular video, which she posted in 2014, explains how to crochet a baby blanket. It has nearly 6 million views.
