"Today's woman is extremely discerning - especially when it comes to her appearance. She has no desire to lead the same miserable existence as the stick-thin model, nor does she want to hide her little lumps and bumps under shapeless clothes, just to look feminine and elegant," Karl Mayer says in an article in the latest edition of its Kettenwirk Praxis magazine.

"Shapewear is one way of resolving the conflict between enjoying one's food and being overweight. These textile ‘bodyformers' provide gentle compression to sculpt and shape the body," the company says.

Positive Patternbeam Drive

Karl Mayer has equipped its DJ series of double-bar raschel machines with its Positive Patternbeam Drive (PPD) to produce such fashionable lingerie. The delivery unit inserts additional elastane at a total of three locations, and takes off the elastic yarn from pattern beams to do this.

"The functions of the 3D panties, which were developed in-house, have been improved in order to demonstrate the design possibilities that are now available," Karl Mayer explains.

"The briefs, which require very little making-up, are manufactured without any side seams whatsoever. The seams in the bottom and stomach areas are incorporated directly on the machine, and the final contours and both halves of the garment are produced so that they are virtually complete in the piece."

According to Karl Mayer, all that has to be done to complete the garment is to turn it inside out, open it out, and close the inner leg seams. ¹ During production, the PPD works the elastane as broad strips in the zone that will subsequently form the waist region - "a little bit of extra compression that guarantees a flat stomach when the garment is worn, but which has none of the disadvantages of conventional shapewear," Karl Mayer says.

"With conventional products, the combination of different fabrics and complicated designs generate high costs and means that everything has to be carefully coordinated at the buying stage," the company adds.

Karl Mayer says the PPD also gives the leg seam and the slightly wider border in the stomach region additional tensioning force, which reduces the tendency of the garment to roll up. The transition points between the garment and the body are said to be flat and smooth. The third yarn system, which is incorporated separately, is a separating thread, which makes it easy to separate the components that have been produced.

New design possibilities

"The PPD therefore offers many new design possibilities, and these can be fully exploited in terms of the machine speed and level of flexibility. Functional zones having different stretch and stitch densities can still be produced using the Multi Speed facility and by changing the pattern accordingly, and different patterns can be worked on both sides of the components," Karl Mayer explains.

The adjacent picture shows an attractive example of this. The decorative flower motifs are worked as a perfect mirror image, so that they are located in exactly the right position. To work the design, ground guide bars GB2 and GB 5, together with jacquard bars JB 3 and JB 4, work the Technet lapping in a shogged arrangement. Ground guide bars GB 1 and GB 6 incorporate elastane into the fabric as weft.

According to Karl Mayer, a range of different yarns can be used to produce a wide variety of different optical effects and functional characteristics. For example, uncovered elastane yarn can be used throughout the fabric, instead of the core-spun yarn normally used, which represents an economical option when working certain types of patterns.

The DJ machine series also enables tubular structures having different sizes and open-work patterns with clearly defined contours to be produced on the same machine.

¹ ‘To hand ready-to-use solutions on a silver platter', Kettenwirk-Praxis 4/2010, pp. 10-11, December 2010, Obertshausen