Chocolate wrapper book about chocolate!

As a book lover and crafty type, I really wanted to do this task. Sitting in my office, I pondered the idea of what I might make a book out of, and what would go in it.

I had an idea involving pancakes, but I had hours and hours of work to go. Could I make a book on my break? What did I have on hand?

Lots of things I rejected as not unusual enough, until I saw my candy jar, full of leftover chocolate eggs from Easter. I love candy wrappers, especially the foil ones, and I decided that I needed to make a book out of them.

First, I had to find something to put in my book. I searched for a while, and found Arnold Adoff's poem, "Let the Biter Beware"

LET THE BITER BEWARE

In the center of each

pale

milk

chocolate lump

there is a hard nut

waiting to bump your

front tooth into the dentist’s chair.

In the center of each

dark

deep

chocolate hunk

there is a car a mel

chunk just waiting to

glue

your teeth to geth er

for ev er.

Take

care.

To preserve the line structure of the poem, I decided that each line would have its own page. So I started peeling chocolates.

Peeling chocolates, and having the foil be in one piece at the end took a bit of work. Some of them unwrapped easily; a few I tore to bits on accident. Next, I flattened out each wrapper to try to get them as smooth as possible. Here's a video I made about the flattening process: WHICH WILL BE POSTED AS SOON AS I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW IT WORKS...

I tried a few different writing techniques: Pen (a complete disaster), Pencil (couldn't read it, and tended to tear the foil), and Sharpie (I didn't have a fine tipped one, so it was illegible). In addition to these option all being less than successful, my hand writing is pretty terrible. So I decided to use my label maker to add the text.

I sorted the foils by size and by color, and did a few test layouts.And that was the end of my break.

I put everything in a drawer, and ran off to a meeting, which it turned out had been canceled, only no one had told me. So, suddenly with an extra hour, I decided to take my dinner break a bit early, and work on my book some more.

I started printing labels, and quickly discovered that I needed more wrappers. So back to peeling chocolates, again. I managed to get all the labels on the foils, with some wild rearranging, as it turned out that the different colors of foil tended to be different sizes.

I laid out my sheets in pairs to make leaves. The first page and the last page of the book, for example, would be on the same leaf, and would form the outer cover. I followed this pattern with all my pages. Then I used scotch tape to join the two pages for each leaf together. The foil was really fragile, and I quickly decided that I would need to cover the pages to that the book could be read more than once.

I covered two leaves with scotch tape before my dinner break was over. I packed my pages (and chocolates) up, and then finished wok for the day.

When I got home, I announce that chocolate needed to be eaten. Sir J. was happy to help. I then broke out the packing tape, which made the taping process go much faster. After taping all my leaves, I punched holes in the middle of each, where the binding would go. I selected some lovely brown embroidery floss from my stash to help tied the chocolate theme together, and started from the inside leaf. It turned out that I had made a small mistake in my leaf construction, and that my two inner most pages would need to be sewn back to back, but I managed to make it work, and soon had the pages sewn together. The book did not want to close! So I took my needle and thread, and stitched through the binding along the spine. This resulted in a really sticky needle (and fingers), which I cleaned up by the powers of Goo-Gone (I love that stuff).

The book was done, so I took pictures of each page, so that you could read it too!