I’m not one for making a big deal of our Valentine’s Day. In the ninth grade, I was dumped the week before and passed out anti-Valentine’s Day cards. In the eleventh grade, I had a boyfriend but didn’t see the point of celebrating a day that commercializes love so I wrote a column on that very topic for The Tampa Tribune, pointing out that we should celebrate our love every day, not just on Feb. 14. This year, my boyfriend and I decided to forgo the fancy dinner and date night and stay in with a homemade meal and Neflix so that we could use the money instead to donate to the research of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) the disease that killed our kitten Sebastion a month ago.
But sometimes a fun Valentine’s Day activity will present inself. This past Saturday my mom, HC USF promotions manager Samantha Caldwell, Uuniversity of Tampa student Jillian Shannon and myself decided to attend the “Victorian Valentine” making class at the Plant Museum downtown. We spent two hours with fabric scraps, lace, rhinestones, and ribbons gluing together our contemporary take on Victorian Valentines. To authenticate the experience, my mom, Samantha and myself cut locks of hair from our own heads to tie up into our creations, just as the Victorians often did with tokens of their affection to their own sweeties.
Afterwards, we toured the museum to check out lavish Victorian living and, of course, the two display cases of antique Valentines. The intricacy was incredible, a far cry from the silly, cheap paper things we buy by the dozens at Walmart to pass out to classmates. These were unique pieces of art with beautiful, calligraphy writing inside. If you do nothing else in downtown Tampa, make sure you drop by the museum someday to check these out.
Here are the Valentines we made:
…and what we were aspiring to from the Victorian Valentine collection: