Making one’s own chocolate molds from finished objects, as I demonstrated last year (and with the chocolate feet saga), is pretty easy. However, I never quite figured out how to make a not-yet-existing object in chocolate.
In particular, this year I want to make the Weavolution logo to put in candy boxes as a donor/volunteer thank-you. (I am also making an AIDS Lifecycle logo thank-you, but there I have an existing medallion to work from.) The main roadblocks are:
- I want good detail, which is hard to get in a small object;
- I am sculpturally challenged, so creating something in miniature is especially difficult for me.
I considered a variety of techniques, which I won’t elaborate here because it would take too long, and finally thought of using a variant of a technique I used back in college, when we used photo-gel and laser-printed transparencies to create silkscreens. So I did some web searches, and came up with this very useful site. This technique transfers the laser-printed image to a thin sheet of photopolymer “rubber” – essentially, a 1/16″ deep rubber stamp made from a laser-printed image. At first it looked like I would have to buy a big pile of equipment in order to try out the technique – which I am not willing to do (yet) since I don’t know if the photopolymer plates will print thick enough to show up in chocolate – but it appears that you can also expose it using the sun, which is what we used to do with our photogel silkscreens in college. So I will buy some laser transparency sheets, create some sort of graphic in Photoshop, and try out this technique. I will probably order 5 or 6 of the photopolymer plates and do some experimentation. I have (don’t I always?) some interesting ideas about creating lettering and texture.
I am also contemplating what flavors to put into this year’s boxes. twenty-one of them are nailed down (my “classic” flavors), but that leaves eight or nine additional items to go. So I will be doing some experimentation over the next few weeks. Top on my list to try are saffron-honey and some things with licorice root (which I personally prefer to anise), but also peanut butter and other tasties. More on that later.
On Su Butler’s suggestion, I have switched to a live-tension warp and am getting MUCH better tension. I will probably put on slightly heavier weights tonight and try weaving to see if that unsticks things. If so, I’ll start weaving the red-orange-yellow shawl. That will give me something to do while the photopolymer plates arrive.