My Funny Valentine: James Bond is crafting KING!!!

Ah, Valentine's Day! A day to pay twice as much as normal for flowers and big ugly heart shaped boxes of chocolates. Ah, amore!

Well, Indy had cooked up a plan with Gigi (my mom) to take us out for dinner and buy me flowers. Indy said this was a very special V-Day as it would be the last one that it was just the 3 of us. Awwwwww.....

I got these flowers:

And these:

Indy told me he looked at the premade bouquets but could get me more flowers if he bought the loose flowers and if he did that, I could put my "special touch" on them.  What a sweet boy!

James Bond had been specifically told (by me) not to buy me chocolates (pregnant + chocolate = disaster) and said he couldn't step on Indy's plans to buy me flowers so he had to think of something different.  Let me back up here.  James Bond works in a very secure building.  Let's just leave it at that.  I'm not even allowed in without surrendering all my electronics and having an escort.  It's not worth the hassle, so I don't go to his office.  This secure building has to be locked up every night by an officer, so they rotate out this duty.  James Bond had been tasked with it for the first 2 weeks of Feb, which meant he would be getting home late every night.  Why?  Because not only do military work there, but civilian contractors too, many of whom do not have their families with them (and often forget that most military members do), and who like to work late into the evening.  James Bond had to stay until the last of them was gone.  A few nights, he had to throw them out because it was pushing 9 pm and he was ready to go home.  Civilian contractors also like to work late so they can come in late in the mornings, not thinking that they are keeping someone else there at night waiting on them.  Got that?  Yeah, so while James Bond sat and waited for the civilians to leave (believe me, if they can, the military flee as quickly as possible after 5pm), he thought about what to do for me for V-Day.  He's very artistic (he's a lefty, which means he's incredibly right brained) and came up with an idea.  He had paper clips and coffee filters aplenty, so he googled how to make flowers from coffee filters.  He watched a tutorial by Martha Stewart but decided he didn't like the way she did them (take that Martha) and could come up with his own way.  He started cutting the coffee filters and experimenting.  He started hand coloring them with markers, but decided that was too much work, so the next morning he smuggled out our food coloring (good thing I had no plans to use it) and his box of water colors.  While he was in charge of the building, he also couldn't leave for lunch, so on his lunch break and after he finished work, he made flowers!  His co-workers thought he had lost it, but when they saw them beginning to take shape, actually commissioned him to make some for their wives and daughters!  Ha!  He told them when he finished mine, he would get to work on theirs.

So, on V-Day, he pulled out a little vase of these:

Can you believe that????  I was totally blown away.  Of course everyone says homemade gifts are the best, but rarely get around to actually making them (especially guys).  Let's take a closer view at a few of them, shall we?

He decided to use some old buttons he found at the Re-Use-It center for the middle of several of the flowers.  He hand cut each of these petals and leaves!  The stems are straightened out paper clips.

This is my favorite flower.  It's actually the very first colored one he made.  He hand colored the petals with a yellow marker and put the detailing on with an orange marker.  This one is very full and looks real to me.

This flower is ingenious!  He wanted to do something "different" (as if he wasn't already!), so he found some sheet music online, put it into a PowerPoint slide, taped a coffee filter to a piece of paper and ran it through the printer.  He then reversed the coffee filter and ran it through again so there would be music on both side.  He's very clever! Isn't it neat???

 

He knows I love tulips, so he made one too!  I didn't get a photo of the center, but he covered a button with a gold Hershey Kiss wrapper that had a heart on it!

The button used on this one is from an old pillow he found at the Re-Use-It.  He pulled off the buttons and tossed the pillow.  He said it was gross anyway, but he liked the buttons.

A lily.

A peach rose.

And the last one I took a close up of, is his least favorite, but I think it beautiful because of the paint details.  It's a carnation bud.  Look at the coloring!

He didn't wrap the coffee filters like many of the tutorials suggested, but rather hand cut each and every petal on every flower.  No two flowers are alike!  I almost cried when he handed me the vase (it is actually an Old McCormick's grinders salt shaker that he pulled the top off of) because of the amount of work and thought that went into this gift.  He's been showing me how he makes them in the evenings (he's not closing the office anymore) and really, this is a detailed process.

After I got my flowers, we went to our favorite Italian restaurant, Casa Sorrento.  Indy paid for dinner (via money Gigi sent him) and then we went to see Tangled (which is awesome).  It was indeed a very special Valentine's Day. 

BTW, James Bond said he might be willing to do an online tutorial if anyone is interested. If not, he said he'd show me how and I'll do one, though I don't know if I'd be quite as good at it as he is.  He's super talented, isn't he???