Elegant garments with fewer seams are the latest fashion trend, and this development is inspiring designers throughout the entire textile manufacturing chain to keep coming up with new creative ideas all the time. It is the job of textile machinery builders, in particular, to meet the requirements of the designers and satisfy the wishes of the fashion world.

KARL MAYER's product developers have been using the Textronic? Lace machine to perfect the technology of producing lingerie fabric that is almost ready to wear, in the shape of the panel fabric shown in the illustration. Compared to the TL 31/1/24 and the TL 66/1/24, which are already well-established on the market, the new TL 43/1/24 offers an extended range of performance features, which enable products requiring very little making-up to be produced efficiently. The key features of this successful concept include speeds of up to 600 min-1 and extended patterning options, which are the result of having 14 pattern bars behind the fall plate and shog paths of up to 170 needles.

The Textronic? Lace can be used to seemingly pluck delicate stars from the sky and place them in a dense array against a delicate, decorative background. The tiny, star-shaped patterns are free-standing and, with their yellowish tones, sparkle attractively against the fabric and make it seem to move across the bra-cups, which are patterned in a wide but flat, filigree, hatched design. A fine organzined material is processed in the pattern bars in front of the fall plate to produce the flat, discreet star pattern.

The pattern bars can generally process every type of yarn currently used in the lingerie sector to produce a wide range of different patterns, including fall-plate patterns with long floats. The yarns that are carried along and not incorporated accumulate when shaping the contours of the bra or placing the stars, and can be clipped with no problems at all.