DIFFICULTY LEVEL: Easy

YARN: Worsted Weight/Size 4, Sport/Size 2, & Thread/Size 0
Color 1: Warm Purple (For Head, Outer Ears, Body, Arms, Legs, and Tail) Recommended: Caron One Pound in Purple
Color 2:Cool Purple* (For Hair, Inner Ears, and Eyebrows) Recommended: Caron Simply Soft in Purple
Color 3:Bright Purple* (For Nose, Hat Band, Neck Bow, and Skirt) Recommended: Caron Simply Soft in Grape
Color 4:Light Purple* (For Hat and Shirt) Recommended: Caron One Pound in Lilac
Color 5:Black* (For Nose and Whiskers)
Recommended: DMC 6-Strand Embroidery Floss Black

HOOKS: K/6.5 mm, F/3.75 mm, & C/2.75 mm

COMPLETED SIZE:

• Height: 10 in / 25.4 cm
• Width: 5 in /12.7 cm
• Depth: 5 in /12.7 cm

PLUS: Several full-color instructional images!

and … STICKERS!
In addition to the crochet pattern file, your purchase includes a hi-res .jpeg file of a Vote Meow sticker template you can use to create your own stickers.

INSPIRATION
In honor of women of color like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Nannie Helen Burroughs who worked for women’s suffrage and the 19th amendment’s passage -- in spite of their liberal white feminist contemporaries’ racism -- and who deserve to be included in an all-too-frequently white-washed history of feminist activism in the U.S., I present Vote Meow.

As a mashup of Hello Kitty and early 20th century suffragettes of color, Vote Meow’s features are both cute and critical -- highlighting and reproving women of color’s historical and continuing erasure in U.S. political movements. She has a mouth (Hello Kitty is famously missing one); plum-colored yarn for the cat body (Hello Kitty is, hello, white); dark purple yarn for hair; and turn-of-the-century-style attire in lilac and lavender-colored yarn.

To distinguish womanism from (white) feminism in her first nonfiction collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker writes “Womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender.” This distinction defines womanism, practiced by women of color, as a more holistic and inclusive form of activism than, (white) feminism. It also characterizes (white) feminism as a compartmentalized off-shoot of Womanism.

2019 © Oriana Gatta. Stitched Whimsy. All rights reserved. You may not share or sell this pattern. Please contact me for my terms if you wish to sell the finished product.

DON’T FORGET!
10% all profits from sales is donated to a rotating list of organization or individual doing oh-so-necessary social justice work.Dec. 31, 2019, donations will be made to RAICES, The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Check them out here: https://www.raicestexas.org !