Dress, the history of fashion, is a production of I-Heart Radio. With over 7 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

Every day, we all get dressed.

Welcome to Dressed The History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who what win of why we wear.

We are fashion historians and your host, Cassidy Zachary, and April Callahan.

Okay, fashion designers, fashion design students, and home sewers, we have heard you.

And for the last three seasons, we've gotten so many requests for this episode that we're going to do today. We couldn't even begin to list all of you who have

submitted this listener request, but time is nigh friends and today is the day.

Yes, because today we are finally going to explore the curiously captivating history of paper patterns i.e. sewing patterns and

today's episode is in honor of Joy Spannabelle and Marie,

who was one of the world's leading experts on this subject.

Her book, A History of Paper Patterns, The Home Dress Making Fashion Revolution, is actually the basis

and inspiration for our examination today.

Very sadly, we lost joy in September of 2018.

So on this two-year anniversary of her passing,

we wanted to pay tribute to her lifelong body of work on this topic.

Joy was really a legend in our field. She had a master's degree in costume design and for many

years she worked at the University of Rhode Island as a professor and chair of the theater department

where she also designed for something like 86 of the school's productions.

I mean, it was a lot.

In the early 1990s, she also undertook this fascinating project to establish a pattern archive in order to preserve the history of commercial sewing patterns.

So fast forward to three decades later and the Commercial Pattern Archive, which is located at the Special

Collections at the Robert L. Carruthers Library at the University of Rhode Island, it now holds

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