A basketball signed by coach Kay Yow.

A Kate Spade scarf.

A $50 gift certificate to Second Empire.

Scarves knitted by students.

Information about breast cancer.

All these things and of course, lots of chocolate can be found at the third annual Chocolate Festival put on by the Women’s Center Thursday Oct. 5 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Talley Ballroom.

Laci Weeden, assistant director of the Women’s Center, said she starts planning the chocolate festival each year in late spring.

Weeden said she asks bakeries and restaurants in the area to donate different kinds of chocolate for the festival. Weeden tries to get an assortment of chocolate.

“We have different chocolate put out at different times,” Weeden said. “You may miss out on cheesecakes, but you get chocolate truffles.”

Weeden said she is excited about this year’s festival because, for the first time, they are having two chocolate fountains rather than one “for dipping strawberries and nutter butters.”

According to Weeden, Whole Foods has donated 22 pounds of chocolate — 11 pounds of milk, 11 pounds of white — to the event. PF Chang’s is donating its great wall of chocolate cake as well.

Carey Stewart, a senior in accounting and volunteer for the festival, said people will get their money’s worth. Stewart said she doesn’t “know many people who go to PF Chang’s and get the chocolate cake,” but at the Chocolate Festival it costs a dollar.

Weeden is also working with Chick Chocolates. After seeing the company on Food Network, Weeden contacted them about contributing to the event. Chick Chocolates will have samples and chocolate for sale at the event.

According to Erin Tracy, a senior in biochemistry and former volunteer, walking into the Chocolate Festival gives a person a “sugar rush of all the senses.”

However, the Chocolate Festival is not only about gorging on chocolate, it’s about breast cancer awareness, according to Weeden.

Stewart said she started volunteering at the Chocolate Festival because her family has been affected by breast cancer, and there’s “not a whole lot to do on campus about breast cancer.” During Stewart’s senior year in high school, her aunt died of breast cancer.

Not all volunteers are directly affected by breast cancer.

“Gratefully, none of my family has battled cancer,” Janza Bush, a senior in textile and apparel management and volunteer for the Women’s Center, said.

Weeden said October is the perfect time to hold the Chocolate Festival because it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

“25 percent of the proceeds go to Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation,” Weeden said.

People don’t know proceeds go to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, according to Bush. She said that message needs to get out to the campus.

The proceeds going to a “good cause” is a main reason Tracy first got involved with the Chocolate Festival.

According to Weeden and the volunteers, a silent auction will take place during the event. Some of the things they will have up for grabs will be Kate Spade scarves with pink ribbons, a basketball coach Kay Yow signed and a gift certificate to a local restaurant. They will also have various items for sale that are associated with the Women’s Center.

Attendees will be exposed to information about breast cancer.

A wellness fair will be the first thing participants walk through. She said while walking through the wellness fair, attendees can get literature about breast cancer and are able to feel healthy and unhealthy breasts.

Volunteering for the Chocolate Festival is “awesome” because it helps out breast cancer and is “awesome chocolate,” according to Stewart.

She said it’s a deal because the participants get to try things they don’t eat every day.

Stewart warns against using all six punches of one’s ticket at first because they will “get to the end of the line and go ‘Dang, I wanted this.'”

The ticket is designed with six places to punch holes. For each sample participants take, they will receive a punch in their ticket. After using all six punches in the ticket, the participant cannot take anymore samples.

Tracy said she remembers the first year of the Chocolate Festival when the Women’s Center offered tickets with 12 punches. They stopped offering that, however, because “there was no way to eat it all.”

“We have pink to-go boxes if [participants] don’t have enough time,” Weeden said.

According to Tracy, people will have to use the to-go boxes because they will have “plenty to take home.”

Over the last three years, the Chocolate Festival has grown “exponentially,” according to Tracy.

The first year the Chocolate Festival was held, it was in the Witherspoon multi-purpose room, and they had to upgrade to Talley Ballroom.

Weeden said she hopes in the future that the Chocolate Festival will be so large that they will have to hold it on the weekend in the RBC Center.

Tracy disagrees. She dreams of having it on campus — where it will bring more people — in Reynolds Coliseum. She also thinks that during the week is a more convenient time because people are already on campus.

Weeden said she planned to sell 400 to 500 tickets for this year’s festival; this year the center sold more than 400 tickets and were sold out of tickets a week before the event.

According to Shannon Johnson, the director of the Women’s Center, the number of tickets depends on the amount of chocolate from donators.

“If we got more chocolate, we could sell more tickets,” Johnson said.

Unlike last year, there won’t be tickets sold at the door since all the tickets have been sold.

Weeden said she had 200 people waiting in line during last year’s festival. “It was like chocolate chaos,” Weeden said.

After the tickets sold, she had to turn away about 100 people.

The volunteers and Weeden are both excited for the turn out this year.

“It just seems to get better every year,” Tracy said.