In the knitwear industry, it has been the practice to manufacture a knitted trim for application to an unfinished edge of a knitted garment such as the arm holes of a sleeveless top garment or the neck hole of a V-necked or round-necked pullover. The trim may be knitted in a strip on a warp knitting machine or by making up lengths of trim on a conventional double bed weft knitting machine in a sequence of parallel strips joined loosely together by means of a strong draw thread. Individual lengths of trim are separated by removal of the draw threads and joined end to end to form a continuous ribbon which is then folded into a double or triple thickness before being attached to the unfinished edge of a knitted garment. The attachment process may be carried out manually wherein individual loops on an edge of the trim are linked point-to-point with loops on an unfinished edge of a knitted garment which is a highly skilled and time-consuming operation that is only cost-effective in the case of very high quality knitwear. for example of cashmere. Machines may be used to perform this operation by sewing the trim onto the garment with matching yarn using overlock or overseam stitching, but this results in a rather noticeable join between the trim and the garment and a thick seam on the inside which of course must be suitably finished to prevent fraying of the joined edges. In order to simulate a link finish, machines have been developed to attach a knitted trim to a knitted garment by sandwiching an unfinished edge of the garment between folded over portions of the trim in accurate alignment and machine stitching with matching yarn along a folded edge of the trim in a process known as "mock-linking".
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds