"Nap of Luxury" by Andy Johnson Journal Times Saturday, May 20, 2000

BURLINGTON - There will be few sweeter places on earth this weekend than Burlington, as the city begins its 14th annual celebration of chocolate.

ChocolateFest 2000, slated to run through Sunday, promises to be very special with the return of a parade and more entertainment. This year's chocolate creation, a 4,500 pound chocolate bed with a carved chocolate headboard, is a showstopper. It also includes a footboard and a chocolate patchwork quilt.

Amber Jean, a Montana based sculptor who created last year's centerpiece, a 14-foot chocolate totem pole, finished this year's creation early Friday morning just as crews prepared to move the piece from the Nestle plant in Burlington to the festival site.

"It's awesome now that it is complete, but here was a lot of hard work involved," Jean said. "Since Monday, I've spent almost 16 hours a day carving." With chocolate embedded under her fingernails, calloused hands, and sore wrists, Jean compared carving the headboard to carving oak.

"It was physically demanding." She said. "I underestimated how long it would take to carve the headboard." The tools she used to complete the project included a hammer, mallet and chisel. All were used Friday as Jean completed touch-up work after the bed was assembled.

Dan Hahm, production manager at Nestle, said the total weight of the creation is roughly 7,500 pounds. He said the weight in actual chocolate is about 4,500 pounds. The headboard stands 9 feet high, and the quilt, which took 10 hours to complete, used about 2,000 pounds of chocolate.

He credited the crew from Nestle who helped assemble the creation, including Brian Baker, a maintenance supervisor at Nestle, who performed many of the calculations for the mold and structure. "This is one of the more complicated creations we've done because there are so many pieces to it, as opposed to a giant, one-piece morsel like we did years ago." Hahm said.

Jean said after the favorable reaction to the totem pole last year, which used 1,500 pounds of chocolate, she wanted to come up with something even better.

"I wanted something that was larger than life, and I tried to work that into a dram theme, and sweet dreams came to mind," she said, "I wanted to top last year."

Jean, a native of Wyoming, has received international recognition for her crafted wooden sculptures and functional art furniture. Her work has been featured in several nationally syndicated magazines.