Valentine’s Day can mean a pretty penny out of pocket for many couples. Jewelry, flowers and a fancy dinner at the hottest resto in town add up quickly, but in a lot of ways these gifts and traditions have lost their meaning and significance. Sure, they’re the pricey options – which, for some, is the only way they know how to show their “affection” – but let’s get real here, this route isn’t very creative… or thoughtful, for that matter.

In lieu of the same ol’, same ol’ this year, consider a thoughtful handmade gift. Yeah, yeah, I know – effort and all. But your S.O. deserves it, if only for putting up with you all year round. Plus, I’m here to help. If you aren’t the creative type, or if you’re just stumped for ideas, here are a few craft projects to spark your inspiration.

1. The Decorated Candy Jar

Start with a Mason jar with a lid; local thrift stores or even major retailers have these available in the kitchenware section. While you’re out, pick up a bag of your boo’s favorite candy – sweets that comes in small pieces, like Kisses, or the new limited-edition Strawberry Shortcake White Chocolate M&Ms from Target. Also grab a red or pink bow and ribbon or garland to go on your jar. To assemble, wash the jar and place the candy inside. Decorate the jar with the bow and the ribbons (or however you see fit; free printables are available at the blog The36thAvenue.com) and then add a little card with a hand-written message of fondness and maybe a sweet memory or two.

2. ‘52 Reasons I Love You’ Cards

This one requires only a deck of cards (minus the jokers), glue, and artistic paper. On separate sheets of the latter, you’ll write one thing you love about your significant other and then glue it to the back of each card. It takes some patience, but once you get through the entire deck of cards you’ve got an incredibly thoughtful Valentine’s Day gift. You can add a small ring binder to keep all the cards together and make for an easier time wrapping or handing the gift to your loved one. If needed, refer to this example of how to decorate and assemble the cards

3. Chocolate Strawberry Bouquet

For this DIY gift you’ll need small wooden sticks, strawberries, melted chocolate and wrapping paper with twine. Simply dip the strawberries in the chocolate, then skewer them on the wooden sticks and let them dry. Once dry, wrap them in the paper and tie the paper loosely with the twine for a classy bouquet look and feel.

4. Cupcake in a Jar

The concept is similar to the jar of candy, but in this instance you get to bake! In simple terms, you’ll bake the cupcake, break it up into chunks and put it in the jar. Once that’s done, tint your frosting pink or red with food coloring and add that on top, then tie a pink spoon to the jar with a festive red-and-white V-Day-inspired ribbon. You can peep more detailed instructions at the Mighty Delighty blog – and share the cupcake, of course.

5. Simple ‘You and Me’ Photo Album

Print out a few great photos of you and your main squeeze that they haven’t seen or aren’t familiar with. Personally, I recommend pulling pics from your phone or Instagram account using the new Fuji Instax Smartphone Printer; I got one for Christmas, and it’s perfect for a project like this. When you’ve chosen the perfect images, buy a small simple photo album – one that you can spruce up and to which you can add your own touches. Write captions for the photos too – a reminder of where you both were when the picture was taken and what the occasion was.

Going the Extra Mile

While there’s nothing wrong with the traditional Valentine’s Day approach, going the extra mile with a handmade gift can add a lot of thoughtfulness and personality to the celebration. If you’re looking for a way to step up your game and really impress your loved one this year, let your artistic side take over and make something that they’ll know you put more thought into than money. 

Isabella Rossellini is leading me into the light. There, in front of an almost full-wall window in a hotel suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in New York City, we stand, beaming, as her assistant snaps a pic. Good lighting is everything, as Rossellini notes in her thick Swedish-Italian accent – otherwise, “it’ll get all black.”

She should know. Rossellini embarked on a career in front of the camera when, at the age of 28, the classic Rome-born beauty fell into modeling, hawking Lancôme as the company’s spokeswoman for 14 years and posing for an array of eminent celeb photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and Robert Mapplethorpe.

“When I worked with him, he was quite sick with AIDS,” Rossellini recalls. “I remember how sad I felt, because he was very handsome and he celebrated in his photos the male body, the human body, and to see him paying such a toll, not even just physically. But he seemed to be in good spirits. I wondered… of course he knew he was dying. It was a very difficult time, the ’80s. And it was the last book that he made. They wanted him to photograph women and he did beautiful portraits of several women.” (Also featuring Yoko Ono and Susan Sarandon, Some Women was published in 1989, the same year Mapplethorpe succumbed to AIDS-related illness.)

Rossellini’s striking appeal wasn’t only dark room-worthy, however.

While modeling, Rossellini also began mirroring the career of her iconic mother, Ingrid Bergman (Rossellini's father is Italian director Roberto Rossellini), reaching beyond the glossy pages of Vogue to become a film star. As abused nightclub vocalist Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s 1986 trippy thriller Blue Velvet, a role that required Rossellini to sing, Mapplethorpe’s muse demonstrated more than a pretty face – she could really act.

Rossellini also happens to know a lot about animal sex. In 2008, she directed, produced, wrote and starred in a series of short films for Sundance titled Green Porno, illustrating the various mating acts of insects and other non-humans with, of course, cardboard and foam rubber. And if you ever wondered how dolphins do it (who hasn't?), the actress also created the 2014 web series Seduce Me, wherein she discusses “blowhole sex” as she pseudo swims in a diorama-inspired scene among some very frisky Flippers.

Rossellini’s latest is certainly less niche. In director David O. Russell’s Joy, the veteran actress is back on the big screen as Jennifer Lawrence’s affluent, finger-wagging stepmom, Trudy, a tough-love foil to the based-on-real-life titular character.

“It’s empowering to women,” Rossellini says, nuzzled into the corner of a sofa, “and it’s also about the struggle of success. Generally when a person is successful people imagine, ‘Oh, overnight success, luck,’ instead of how arduous it is. The film portrays it very well. Family encourages you and discourages you because they are protective.”

Though Rossellini recognizes Joy’s unwavering ambition to seize businesswoman status – a path she blazes after inventing a fancy mop – her own life, she says, has been “completely different,” a truth she attributes to her European background as well as her famous film-industry family.

“You know, I was more successful than I thought I’d be,” she reveals. “I’m old enough to have belonged to a group of women who thought, ‘I’m gonna get married and be a housewife.’

Instead, a career came, and it was really modeling – modeling is almost like winning the lottery.”

Rossellini’s modeling career continued to blossom in the ’80s, when she graced the covers of countless women fashion mags: Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair and Elle. She could’ve been a stay-at-home mom. She could’ve cleaned and cooked and called it a day. And she thought, for many years, she would. But in her 30s, she changed her mind.

Rossellini says, “I understood that being financially independent meant also to be independent.”

“You don’t really do anything to become a good model,” she adds. “You’re either chosen or not chosen, liked or not liked. If you are a bitch, they’re not gonna hire you anymore. And modeling really teaches you the discipline of work. So modeling for me was a wonderful revelation.

Though my mother worked – my mother was Ingrid Bergman, had a big career – it was seen as she had a gift, she had a talent, that it was extraordinary. It was a kind of a call for her, but it wasn’t percolating down to the family that all the women should have a career, no.”

In 1976, Rossellini shot her movie debut, playing a minor role in her mother’s film A Matter of Time. Ten years later, Rossellini became an icon in her right, achieving cult status after starring in Blue Velvet.

It was Death Becomes Her in 1992, though, that secured the actresses’ queer cred. And god bless that film – it featured a dream trifecta: Rossellini, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, an ensemble cast who punched up the film’s camp commentary on pre-Botox-fad superficiality. “Now, a warning,” her potion-touting character, Lisle Von Rhuman, cautioned Meryl’s Madeline Ashton to the delight of supremely geeked gays everywhere.

Rossellini reveals that Death Becomes Her was always meant to be one of the gayest films about beauty you’ve ever seen – even if she, and director Robert Zemeckis, didn’t know it at first. 

“Robert Zemeckis told me,” Rossellini says about discovering that she was, in fact, starring in a “gay film.” “When the film came out, Robert Zemeckis was so successful after Roger Rabbit and the films that he did at the time were big, big, big. Also, they were family films, so when he did Death Becomes Her he also thought it was going to be a family film, but then they did all this marketing research and said” – Rossellini unleashes a whooping laugh  – “‘Oh, it’s a gay film!’”

It took almost no time for Zemeckis and the cast to realize they weren’t making the next Roger Rabbit. (Sorry, kids.) “Within three, four months he said, ‘You know, our audience is a gay audience,’” Rossellini recalls.

Rossellini has become accustomed to swooning gay adoration. She’s inspired drag queens, and not just with that vampy nip-hiding-necklace coverup she wore in Death Becomes Her.

“They do me in drag in Blue Velvet,” she admits, heartedly amused. “I had a friend who was gay who died, unfortunately, and he would go out on Halloween and dress up like me. I had a Blue Velvet robe, and I had my wig for a while, and he would borrow it every year.”

Rossellini is smitten with the idea of men resurrecting her most iconic screen characters in drag. She calls it a “compliment.”

“Oh, it’s fun,” she adds. “I know there are certain women like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand who are particularly liked by the gay culture. I know that strong women are liked, and I wonder why strong women and not weak women.” She pops a laugh. “I don’t know what it is in the gay culture! What is it that makes the gay culture to be so supportive of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, images of these iconic women? Why did you like so much stronger women instead of, like, a housewife?”

I explain that, when it comes to empowered female icons, young gay men like myself aspire to their strength and power. Naturally, Madonna is mentioned. Rossellini famously appeared in the Material Girl’s “Erotica” video, and also photographed for her controversial Sex book, both out in 1992. The latter, she says, was not what she had hoped.

“I didn’t like it totally,” Rossellini says of Sex.

“In a way, I found it a bit moralistic in the sense that Madonna is playing the sadomasochistic, Madonna playing the gay. It was teaching us to be open-minded, and she didn’t really reveal anything about herself. It wasn’t vulnerable. Vulnerability is not what she exudes, and what she did was powerful and unique. There was something about the book that was not erotic, and not moving either. It was aesthetic. It was guarded. It wasn’t empowering."

She goes on: “But she is an incredible lady. I’m looking at her, because she’s now in her 50s and I’m 63, and I would like to have a role model of a woman who is older. I want to see these powerful women. How do they fight ageism? What do they propose to fight ageism?”

Regarding Hollywood ageism, not much has changed, she admits. “I see that, at 40 now, you’re still considered beautiful, but I don’t see it defeated. They stretch the younger age longer, but I haven’t seen acceptance.”

Rossellini celebrates Streep and Helen Mirren, actresses who have “given old age an energy that is beyond that” without sucking down an age-defying potion. At the same time, she notes, “there are fewer roles (for older women), and they go to them.”

It’s a reality she’s come to terms with, and instead of sulking over Streep and Mirren’s lock on roles for women over 60, she’s blazed her own quirky path. The titles alone are telling (and this is not counting her horny dolphin doc): The Saddest Music in the World, My Dog Tulip and 2011’s Chicken with Plums.

It’s no surprise, then, that she’s also voiced a hamster. In the gay-themed coming-of-age drama Closet Monster – from out producer Niv Fichman and first-time director Stephen Dunn, who’s also gay – Rossellini takes on a rodent. Her involvement, she says, is partly due to the fact that she’s friends with Fichman, and also, she says, “maybe because I study animals, or maybe just because I have a foreign voice.”

For the film’s protagonist, a sexually confused boy named Oscar, the hamster is an illusion, his muse for comprehending life tropes like “mortality, lying… that life is tough,” Rossellini says, laughing.

Though it won Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, the indie isn’t meant for mainstream consumption, like Joy, and that’s just fine by Rossellini.

“Since I was always interested in animals, I went back to university to study animals and then I made my own film and I do monologues,” she says, regarding her peculiar one-offs. “The work that I have done doesn’t have the exposure of Joy. I am still working and doing a lot of work but more in an artisanal way.”

After all, someone has to enlighten the world on the sexual habits of sea animals.

Growing up in suburban Chicago, Chris Mosier had no FTM athletic role models. There were none at Northern Michigan University either, where – among many other activities – Mosier edited the school paper, performed as the Wildcat Willie mascot, led a service organization and played intramural sports.

But very quietly, Mosier has become the first openly trans man on a U.S. men’s national team (triathlon). His event – the run-cycle-run sprint duathlon – takes an enormous amount of time and energy.

His full-time job is assistant director of housing at a New York City-area university. But Mosier still manages to serve as executive director of GO! Athletes, a national LGBT student-athlete network. It’s an unpaid post, but he devotes many hours a week to it.

Now he’s taken on another task. GO! Athletes is rolling out a new and novel mentorship program. And Mosier is in charge.

The initiative was two years in the making. The rising number of openly gay athletes has had a snowball effect. More and more competitors (and coaches) are also considering coming out.

When an athlete comes out – particularly a big name – he or she is inundated with emails, texts and letters. There are plenty of congratulations – and lots of requests for advice.

“There’s a lot of informal mentorship going on,” Mosier notes. “We want to provide more structure and guidance to the process. And we want to make sure people can provide mentorship in manageable ways.”

The aim is to connect LGBT athletes (and coaches) with others – ideally, in their own sport or geographic area, and similar sexual, gender, racial and ethnic identity  – who can help them deal with issues of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The need is profound. According to a January 2014 report by MENTOR, 89 percent of at-risk LGBT youth have never had a formal mentor – and 37 percent have never had any mentor at all. The figures are undoubtedly higher for LGBT athletes, because traditionally boys and girls in sports have had fewer role models than those in other activities. Thus, they are less likely to reach out for help – and less likely to have others reach out to them.

A 2012 report by Campus Pride found that one in four LGBT student-athletes in college are “pressured to be silent about their sexual identity among teammates, coaches and other athletes.” They are three times as likely to experience harassment, compared to non-athlete peers. The report also found that they are unlikely to believe their administration or athletic department would support them.

Last year, GO! Athletes secured a grant to develop a pilot mentorship program, in the Delaware Valley. This year, the LGBT Sports Coalition gave its own funds, to build on those first steps.

GO! Athletes examined a variety of mentorship program, in and outside the gay community. They hired a consultant who had done mentorship work at the University of Pennsylvania.

They had to answer plenty of questions: Who would be mentored? How would mentors be trained? How would mentors and mentees be matched, and communicate? How would confidentiality be assured? Legal issues? How would the program be assessed?

It was a time-consuming process, particularly for an all-volunteer group. Finally, though, the mentorship program is a reality. GO! Athletes is publicizing it through social media, and with outreach to athletic directors and athletic conferences, and through LGBT centers on college campuses.

Mentors are in the process of being trained. They’re learning how to ask open-ended questions. How to assess the situation at a school or campus that may be very different from their own. And how not to force any one particular outcome.

“The intention is not to get everyone to be out,” Mosier notes. “It’s just to talk through any situation a mentee may be facing, with someone who understands what they’re going through. And to provide options.”

There is no age limit, though most mentees are in high school or college. Mentors and mentees attending the annual LGBT Sports Coalition summit in Portland, Oregon each June will have the opportunity to meet face to face – if they haven’t already – at a GO! Athletes-sponsored reception.

Mentor applications have poured in from around the country. If there’s one common thread among the men and women hoping to become mentors, Mosier says, it’s this: “I wish I’d had a mentor. That would have been a game-changer for me.”

Chris Mosier knows that feeling well from his own life. Which is why, today, he’s mentoring GO! Athletes’ very remarkable arena of mentors.

To learn more about the mentorship program, and apply to be a mentor or mentee, click on www.goathletes.org/mentorship.

Judith Light didn’t know courage until she met the gay community.

As one of a few prominent celebrities in the ’80s to pledge her unwavering support to “the leaders,” as she calls them, the Who’s The Boss? actress was instrumental in changing the lives of LGBT people at the height of the AIDS epidemic three decades ago. But, she says, it was her own life that needed changing.

In a candid conversation with Light, 66, the actress reflects on her staunch advocacy and the need for the compassion her hit show Transparent is rooted in.

Judith, I watched the first episode and was really moved. The world is a scary place right now, so to see you and co-star Jeffrey Tambor share such a tender moment at the end of the first episode was especially moving. The kindness and love and empathy and compassion between the two of you in that scene was really profound.

Awww – I love that you started off that way. You know, people have not talked about that enough, I think. They have in other ways, but you noticing that – that really means a lot to me, so thank you.

I think this is the kind of show that people need right now.

I do too. And I think when you only think about this show as a transgender show, you don’t get the real truth of it, which is that it’s about transgender people but that it’s also about humanity and people – and people living their truth and being honest and authentic and courageous.

What does it mean to you to know you’re changing people’s hearts and minds with that message?

It’s huge. All of us feel a tremendous responsibility to get it right. Jeffrey always says, “Lives are at stake,” and so we all do try to make that the top note. That’s really important to all of us. How it makes me feel as a longtime LGBTQ advocate – it thrills me. I feel as though my life and my service and my work have all come together in one place, so it makes me feel fantastic. Even though I hear from people who say, “Why would you do this?” or, “This is weird,” the value of it far outweighs those people who have problems.

What is the negativity you’re referring to?

There are those voices out there on social media that say, “This is so weird” – they aren’t talking about the show; they’re talking about the transgender community. I say that this is an issue in our world, and what you started off talking about – the love and the caring and the compassion and the concern – I think that’s what we all need to be giving each other. Life is difficult enough without us being denigrating to anyone in the world. Let people live their truth. Let them be. It’s a message this show supports.

Did you think the show would be given the warm welcome it’s been given before it aired?

No. We literally had no idea. We hoped that it would be something that people would support, that people would love. This is (show creator) Jill Soloway’s parent. It’s her story. So we all hoped, but we didn’t know. We weren’t sure. We just knew that all of us – Jill, the writers and the whole entire team; I’m talking about Amazon and everyone else – hoped that it would be something that would educate and elevate the culture, but we didn’t know. We didn’t have any idea. Then when the success happened, we were all so grateful for it that we had to make sure when we came back for the second season that we were as responsible as we could possibly be. Lives are at stake. And there are people who are still being thrown out of their homes, and hate crimes are perpetrated against them and they’re fired from their jobs because they’re transgender. This is 2015. We feel very responsible to do the right thing.

How has that message been transformative for you?

This is something that I have looked toward for such a long time. It was the LGBTQ community that inspired me to be the kind of person I wanted to be. I wanted to be authentic and courageous, and for so long I wasn’t. When I began doing a lot of advocacy work in the early ’80s for HIV and AIDS, I saw the community and the way the community was operating against all odds, against a world and a culture and country that gave them nothing and denigrated them. It was unconstitutional behavior toward the community, and this community just rose up and said, “We will create places to take our friends who are sick, we will do their funerals, we will take them to the hospital, we will change their IVs and their bedpans, and we will learn.” And the lesbians came in and said, “Gay men, you are our brothers and we will take care of you,” and the drag queens and the bisexual community and the transgender community – everybody pulled together. I looked at this community and said, “This is breathtaking. This is the kind of world and people I want to be around. These are the kind of people I want to be working with.”

I said, “We have to tell the truth about what’s really going on here.” My friends and the community were dying in droves and two presidents wouldn't even say the word “AIDS.”

It was reprehensible to me. It was the opposite of the way you started this interview. It was the lack of compassion, the lack of humanity and the pretending that this was something else that it wasn’t. It was sheer unadulterated homophobia and I couldn’t … I didn’t… I wanted to be like the community.

At the time, there weren’t a lot of celebrity allies stepping up to the plate. Bette Midler, Elizabeth Taylor, yourself. What did that feel like for you?

You know, it wasn’t something of what it felt like. It was the thing that had to be done. And Bette was amazing, and Elizabeth Taylor was amazing. None of us were thinking at that time, “I’m doing important work.” We were thinking, “This is what should be done, what has to be done.” It was, “Get to work everybody. People are dying in droves, and we’re losing an entire generation of people.”

We lost so many people in the theater. Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS was on the frontline for years helping people. We were losing people in droves in the theater community – in every community! It wasn’t even a question. People would come out and tell their families that they had AIDS and their families disowned them. So it wasn’t what you thought about. You went to the hospital because they were dying and nobody was there with them. You didn’t think about it. It wasn’t a thought process. It was an emotional human response to an epidemic where there was no help forthcoming. And I mean, who’s more creative than the gay community? So everybody got together and said, “OK, we’re gonna put on a show and raise money, and we’re gonna create the AIDS rides like Dan Pallotta did and we’re gonna raise millions and millions of dollars because this is our family.” I took my lead from the community. They were the leaders. To me, they’re still the leaders.

When this community knows that, as they did at the height of the AIDS pandemic, they will become even more powerful than they are now. It is this community that got same-sex marriage to happen. It is the devotion to the work, and this community has done it. This community has done this. So that’s why I say I took my lead from this community. This is a community I respect and look up to and honor.

You know, we’ve always considered you to be family.

Thank you and I appreciate that, and that’s why when I get to do a show like Transparent I get to talk about this with you. We get to talk in a much more powerful, prominent way about the transgender community, which has been too long in the shadows, and it’s time. It’s really time.

When it comes to transgender issues, this show has hit the zeitgeist.

My manager of 35 years calls it “divine choreography.” He coined that phrase. He said there are things in life that are divine choreography, and it’s not just cosmic, it’s not just coincidence, it’s not just serendipity. There is something that is happening and it’s really important, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it.

Looking back at your career from One Life to Live on through Transparent, what does the gay community tend to recognize you most for?

It’s everything. It’s generational actually. It starts with One Life to Live and then it literally goes to Who’s the Boss? and then after that it’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Ugly Betty, but there’s always something that’s particularly generational about who it is talking to me that they remember me for. So that’s what’s so interesting. I mean, I’ve been around a long time! So, it’s generational, and so everything is different for every person. I find it very interesting, and I love it. Other people only remember me from coming back to Broadway in the last five years, so there’s that. I’m in a Broadway show right now. I’m actually sitting in my dressing room talking to you. I’m doing this play with Keira Knightley called Thérèse Raquin at Studio 54, so then there will be a generation of people who will remember me for being on Broadway.

Like Katy Perry. She raved about Thérèse on Twitter.

I know! I adore her. She is such a doll – oh my god. She is so dear, really. She is very, very special. She’s a great advocate for the community too.

I know you have a show to get to, but it’s been a delight. Such a pleasure. Thank you, Judith.

Of course. Thank you for wanting to talk. I really appreciate it. And thank you for starting the interview off so beautifully.