A Greenville, South Carolina, USA, woman is bursting with happiness after breaking a record.
On 30 July 2021, Elizabeth Allen strung together 10,000 Starburst candy wrappers, creating the longest candy wrapper chain.
Elizabeth first began folding Starburst wrappers in the fall of 2017 during one of her college classes at Furman University.
Elizabeth’s college professor Dr Judy Stuart would provide her students with candy during their evening class.
The students would quickly eat their Starburst to give the wrappers to Elizabeth.
Eventually, students from Elizabeth’s other classes began giving their candy wrappers to her as well.
“I think best when my hands are busy,” she said.
Folding my classmates’ candy wrappers kept my mind focused.
Elizabeth also had Starbursts available in her college apartment for friends to eat.
She also taught summer camp at her university and had campers mail her their candy wrappers after the programme to add to her chain.
The last 2,000 or so wrappers came from my class during my first and second years of teaching,” said Elizabeth.
“As a reward or to help students stay awake during a longer day, I would share Starbursts and they were so careful to not rip the wrappers.”
Elizabeth enjoyed how excited people around her would become when they would offer her a wrapper to add to her “Officially Amazing” chain, and her students loved that they were able to help her accomplish her goal.
Elizabeth initially started making tiny paper airplanes with the Starburst wrappers, but soon realized they didn’t fly very well.
Another classmate showed her how to fold the wrappers to make a chain for a bracelet at summer camp.
She used the technique to fold the wrappers and had a chain about four inches long by the end of the class.
By winter break, Elizabeth had a chain that was close to jump rope length.
She worked on her candy wrapper chain during other classes, during her job at the post office, waiting for marching band practice to begin, and whenever she had a free moment.
She didn’t think about attempting a record title until the spring of 2018 as the chain got longer and longer.
Elizabeth strung the wrappers together by folding them into long rectangular shapes and then folding them into a V shape in large batches.
As she connected them, she began threading together new colours every hundred wrappers or so.
This meant she had to dismantle the original jump-rope chain to be consistent with the pattern, but it made counting them much easier.
The candy wrapper chain includes shades of pink, red, yellow, orange, blue, green, and purple.
Some flavours were seasonal or limited edition.
Elizabeth found an unofficial record that included 200 candy wrappers and by that point, her chain had already exceeded that amount.
However, she wanted to beat the unofficial record by a large amount, so she kept stringing the wrappers together.
She finally completed her candy wrapper chain in 2021, after four years of work.
Elizabeth says the only inconvenience to creating the longest candy wrapper chain was that her hands would cramp up and ache for several days if she folded the wrappers for too long.
She also found that after the chain exceeded 500 wrappers, it could not support its own weight and would begin to rip apart.
That meant she couldn’t add wrappers to the chain unless she toted the entire chain around with her, which quickly required a large plastic moving container to hold it all.
However, there were some benefits to creating the candy wrapper chain such as helping her elementary school start a recycling programme that helped collect paper to recycle throughout the school.
“It lasted for a year until Greenville County Schools stopped their recycling pick-up services and the amount of recycling became too much for me to take home with me to recycle,” said Elizabeth.
Now I can use it to teach my students that anything is possible if you find something you enjoy and stick with it.
Elizabeth says many people think she is a hoarder or doesn’t have any sense of what is important to keep.
Often, they don’t believe that the longest candy wrapper chain is a real record title and Elizabeth has to pull up the Guinness World Records website to prove it.
However, her friends and students think her record is amazing and love that someone they know has broken the record.
Today, the candy wrapper chain sits in a storage container in Elizabeth’s classroom.
“I tried to hand it around my classroom, but the delicate chain falls apart when stretched too far,” she said.
“Also, many residual fruit flavours together are not an appealing scent.”
Although Elizabeth does not currently have any plans to break any other records, she says she does have several students who are planning to beat her record.
She has now taken up other hobbies to keep herself entertained.
“After achieving the world record, I have been sewing to pass the time and keep my hands busy,” said Elizabeth.
I still love to teach my students how to fold wrappers, but I can’t bring myself to eat another Starburst just yet!
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