Full-fashioned Hosiery.—In addition to the large and important branch of the footwear trade which is devoted to the making of plain and ribbed articles devoid of seams and which comprise a large and important section of the knitting industry, we have other systems such as the full-fashioned hosiery trade which produce varied types of footwear. For full hose the length is greater, and as it has to cover the leg of the wearer right over the knee, it requires to be shaped to the fit of the individual. In the cheaper classes of hosiery an effort is made to introduce a diminution in the width of the leg towards the ankle by means of boarding, that is, the stockings are made uniform in width till nearly the ankle except for any small contraction which it is possible to effect by tightening the tensions. The woollen articles are stretched on boards carved to the shape of the leg and when dried in a heated chamber the natural plasticity of the wool enables the articles to take up the shape they have been stretched into, the wide portion of the leg stretches, whilst at the narrow portion the width contracts. Obviously this device cannot long stand the exigencies of wear, and after a short period of service the lower leg portion begins to widen and the result is most untidy. When one comes to consider the great trouble involved in making an article true to shape, it will be realized that such stratagems of quick manufacture mean a considerable saving of time.

As the name implies, full-fashioned hosiery is worked on the knitting frame in flat pieces which are afterwards seamed or joined together to form the article as required. For a full-fashioned hose in plain stitch, a rotary frame of the Cotton's Patent type is employed, and they are made with two articles in one normal division of the frame, that is, in a 12-at-once machine, for garment size we should be able to make twenty-four articles of hose at one and the same time. The leg is made uniform in width right down to the calf when narrowings are performed according to the rate of diminution required, but it is when the heel is reached that greatest labour is expended. It is necessary to work the heel in two sections at each side, and the foot sole is worked on to these pieces for the lower portion, the upper part of the foot being a continuation of the leg and the whole is secured by a seam along each side of the foot. By this system of manufacture it becomes possible to make a much more roomy and capacious heel than is general on the automatic seamless machine, for it can be made square-shaped and of any convenient size by enlarging or contracting the heel portions.

This method of manufacture is termed the English heel, but there is another system known as the French heel which is also largely adopted for certain classes of goods. The real test of these articles is to note the seam, which in the English foot always occurs along each side of the foot and down the back of the heel. In the case of the French foot the seam occurs along the centre of the sole of the foot which is obviously an awkward arrangement from point of view of comfort. The French style of foot is often employed for articles which have clocking or embroidered patterns on them, whilst there is also a saving of time in the process of making. The upper and lower portions of the foot are made in one width and afterwards folded over with only one seam along the middle of the sole of the foot, whilst in the case of the English foot the seam is double and occurs along each side of the foot. It is interesting to be able to distinguish between these various methods of making hosiery; for the article in which no effort is made to fashion the leg on the frame the marking indicative of narrowings for the leg will be entirely absent, and in their place will be the temporary local thickening of the fabric due to the increase in the number of stitches at that point. In the case of the full-fashioned article, the shape will be gradual and symmetrical, for the French foot only one seam will be found along the centre of the foot, whilst in the English variety a seam will occur at each side.

CHAPTER XII
Colour in Knitted Goods

The part played by colour in knitted goods depends largely on the use to which they have to be put and the variety of garment in which they are employed. For undergarments which are seldom noted in wear for general purposes, the rôle of colour is slight and the prevailing tints are white, cream or mixture varieties of the natural or tinted class. The nature of the tint for undergarments is important, and a connoisseur will be able to distinguish quite a number of qualities in a white garment. The tint of a white article depends on a number of factors, one of the chief being the class of wool used in its production. Some wool classes are in themselves whiter than others according to the place from which the wool is obtained. Most types of merino wools give materials of a splendid whiteness, whilst the majority of home wools give a result which is more or less of a yellowish nature; if sand particles are adhering in any quantity, the result is to impart a reddy tint which is difficult to eradicate in bleaching or scouring. The yellow tint, common to most classes of wool, is not evident at first sight, and it is only by comparison with bleached goods that the observer may be able to tell the difference. For many purposes of ordinary wear yellowish tinted goods are quite serviceable and are sold under the designation of cream. This tint is the result of a colouring pigment present in the medullary cells of the material and can be removed by one or other of the various methods of bleaching, but the yellow tinge may be greatly increased by scouring in too hot liquor or using cleansing agents which exercise drastic action on the wool fibre. Similarly when the goods are in the hands of the wearer, the yellow tint may be considerably increased in intensity if care be not exercised in washing and if agents of the proper strength be not employed. To preserve the whiteness of bleached articles certain precautions have to be observed in scouring and these may be summarized as follows. The temperature of the scouring liquor or the washing solution should not be raised beyond what is absolutely necessary to effect a removal of the dirt, for a high temperature produces a kind of melting action on the goods which causes the internal scales of the fibre to fuse to some extent, with the result that a permanently yellow tinge is imparted. Next to the temperature, which should be as close to the "lieu warm" as possible, is the question of the nature and composition of detergents. Launderers know that an application of a certain amount of soda or alkali accelerates the scouring action and gives to the liquor a certain softness which is rather misleading. The softening experienced really constitutes a dissolving action on the wool fibre which settles on the material when dry a feeling of pronounced hardness. These two factors combined with a high temperature of scouring liquor and an excess of alkali or soda will destroy the quality of the purest white and impart a permanently discoloured or faded yellow appearance to the finest goods.

Natural Tinted Goods.—The simplest departure from pure white undergarments is to be found in the well-known natural coloured members of the knitting industry, which are usually pants, shirts and combination garments. This is obtained by an admixture with white of about 10 per cent. of coloured fibre, and has the effect of increasing the serviceability of the garments by allowing more extended intervals between the washes. In their usual forms these blends or tinted shades do not possess an aspect of attractiveness, the general run being in dull brown, drab or cold bluish tint, but recently there has been a tendency to brighten up the blends somewhat and introduce an element of greater attractiveness to the garments. There is not, however, great scope for colour effect in such goods; little colour is wanted, as they seldom come into vision.

Horizontal Stripes.—Unfortunately the knitted fabric as such does not give great scope for the production of coloured effects in the plain stitch because of its peculiar structure as an essentially weft fabric. The thread is inserted crosswise in the fabric, both vertical and horizontal elements of the structure being formed from one and the same yarn, and this limitation must be carefully kept in mind when considering the capacity of the fabric for showing colour. From the inherent horizontal character of the fabric it is evident that cross effects such as horizontal stripes of colour can be much more expeditiously produced than effects of the vertical variety. There is something jarring about a predominantly horizontal series of colour stripes, for when these are made into garments they show crosswise, whilst the prevailing cast of the human figure is vertical. For the great bulk of goods, therefore, cross stripes are quite unserviceable except, perhaps, for the sporting jersey, where the object is to arrest the attention of the observers and enable them to trace the movement of individual players in the field. In most types of knitting mechanism the cross colour effect is much more easily produced than the vertical, because we have simply to provide a colour for each thread-carrier and these are brought into operation in succession according to the pattern required. To overcome the inherent defect of the horizontal direction, fabrics are often turned round a right-angle so that a horizontal colour stripe becomes a vertical one, but this has the disadvantage of turning the stitches on their side. The stretch in length is greatly increased over the width, and such garments show a tendency to elongate considerably during their period of wear, whilst the elasticity in the width is much reduced from the normal. In wearing such a garment the tendency is for the fabric to go to length by reason of its own weight combined with the action of the wearer in walking.

In considering patterns for horizontal striped goods, it should be borne in mind that the average rotary frame has a side-to-side movement of the thread-carrier, and that the full extent of the motion requires two courses to complete, once to the right and another to the left. If single courses are inserted it means that one of the thread-carriers has to be kept on the off side of the frame and special tackle requires to be used to work odd courses on these machines. In making out patterns for horizontal striped goods, the patterns should be built as far as possible on evenly numbered courses, 2, 4, 6, etc., for in this way the thread-carrier for any particular colour can be brought back to the starting-point. The usual way of indicating horizontal striped patterns is to detail each colour and the number of courses in succession until the whole pattern is complete. Thus we might have a pattern as follows: 12 black, 6 white, 2 grey, 4 black, 12 white, 6 grey, 6 white. When colour patterns are written in this fashion it may become a rather lengthy process in the case of complicated arrangements such as are often required for fine gauge goods, and for these it is a saving of time and labour to arrange the colour scheme in the following manner—

Black12.4..
White6.12.6
Grey2.6..

In this case the colours present in the effect are set down one below the other as shown, and the pattern is indicated by the figures in the columns beginning at the left-hand side and reading downwards from top to bottom for each row, when completed a start is made with the next row and so on till the pattern is finished. The following gives another example of a horizontal striped arrangement which embodies several fancy colours—