Lace and a method for its manufacture

Claim 1

A net material knit on a raschel knitting machine characterized in appearance by a repetitive pattern of squares that circumscribe small six-sided figures, the net being defined by a primary and a secondary group of threads, each thread of the primary group being continuously chain-stitched to provide a plurality of adjacent, independent knitted wales, each thread of the secondary group being unlooped with respect to itself but laid into the loops of the wales of the primary group in a selected manner that fixedly positions the wales with respect to each other and establishes the pattern of the lace, a first thread of the secondary group passing through the loops of an adjacent pair of wales to form the side edges of adjacent pattern repeats and link them together, the first thread of the secondary group also being caused to interconnect in the weft direction the opposite sides of a given repeat unit to complete the square pattern in the weft direction, a second adjacent pair of knitted wales partially displaced and held in the weft direction within the interior of the defined square of the netting by a second and third thread of the secondary group of threads, the second and third threads of the secondary group joining the wales of the second pair to each other adjacent the top and bottom of the repeat pattern intermediate the side edges and joining each wale of the second pair to the adjacent wale of the first pair at a midpoint in the side wall of the square in the warp direction.