Suffering Suffrage Cats!

We continue the NPTC 2021 convention in Washington, DC. After leaving the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office, I met up with several of my friends outside the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument sign. The building was closed for renovation, so we weren't able to go inside. But we came prepared with our Suffrage Cats. 

This lovely little stuffed animal was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Although detractors attempted to use cats to portray women's passivity and discourage them from petitioning for the right to vote in the early 1900s, the women turned it around and made the cat their mascot. All of us had either received them as gifts or bought them outright for ourselves, and we wanted to show them off, so I arranged this photo. I sent a copy to Belmont-Paul to say, Sorry we missed you. They LOVED it! They posted it on their Facebook page, and, from what I gather, also sold a lot more cats!

I originally planned for this layout to just feature the 5x7 photo of our group. However, the Facebook memory appeared before I created this, and so I ended up downloading and printing a copy of the Facebook post that included the photo. The style is based on one of the CM Virtual Crop sketches from June 2025 (Scroll to Layout #2). The 8" square in the middle became the perfect mat for the printed post. I used some scraps of a theme pack called "Cattitude" for the top and bottom triangles. I didn't have anything in a vertical layout, so I had to root through my stash to find a matching tone. The yellow of the rough plaid does match the tiny paw prints on the first set of triangles. The purple was perfect, and because purple and gold are part of the suffragists' colors, it was serendipitous. 

The cat-themed stickers were also from the Cattitude pack. The top left and bottom right corners featured some random stickers from the Washington, D.C. stash, and they complemented the theme well. I like that the corners were 2" empty squares. While many people who put this layout together used printed paper there, I was able to fill the corners with stickers. It reminds me of the technique where you punch the border maker cartridges in all but the first and last notches of the guide. Something like this layout. That one used a "knock-out" style punch, but you can do it with any type of cartridge.