Hem

A hem in sewing is a garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded narrowly and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric.

Methods

There are many different styles of hems of varying complexities. The most common hem folds up a cut edge, folds it up again, and then sews it down. The style of hemming thus completely encloses the cut edge in cloth, so that it cannot unravel. Other hem styles use fewer folds. One of the simplest hems encloses the edge of cloth with a stitch without any folds at all, using a method called an overcast stitch, although an overcast stitch may be used to finish a folded "plain hem" as well.

There are even hems that do not call for sewing, instead using iron-on materials, netting, plastic clips, or other fasteners. These threadless hems are not common, and are often used only on a temporary basis.

The hem may be sewn down with a line of invisible stitches or blind stitch, or sewn down by a sewing machine. The term hem is also extended to other cloth treatments that prevent unraveling. Hems can be serged (see serger), hand rolled and then sewn down with tiny stitches (still seen as a high-class finish to handkerchiefs), pinked with pinking shears, piped, covered with binding (this is known as a Hong Kong finish), or made with many other inventive treatments.

Hem (disambiguation)

A hem is a sown edge of cloth. Hem may also refer to:

Creatures

People

Places

Codes

Initialisms

HEM can stand for:

Hem (knitting)

A hem in knitting is the edge of a piece of knitted fabric that is parallel to the rows of stitches, as compared to a selvage, which is perpendicular to the hem and rows of stitches. Hems can be made in several ways.

The simplest approach is to bind off, possibly with decorative elements such as picots. This approach adds no extra thickness at the hemline (which is sometimes desirable).

Another approach amounts to a tuck: the fabric is folded over and the stitches are knit together pairwise with the stitches of a previous row. In this approach, the fabric is doubled along the hemline.

References

See also

Idle

Idle (idling) is a term which generally refers to a lack of motion and/or energy.

Uses

In describing a person or machine, idle means the act of nothing or no work (for example: "John Smith is an idle person"). This is a person who spends his days doing nothing could be said to be "idly passing his days." (For example: Mary has been idle on her instant messenger account for hours.) A computer processor or communication circuit is described as idle when it is not being used by any program, application or message. Similarly, an engine of an automobile may be described as idle when it is running only to sustain its running (not doing any useful work), this is also called the tickover (see idle).

Idleness as dependent upon cultural norms

Typically, when one describes a machine as idle, it is an objective statement regarding its current state. However, when used to describe a person, idle typically carries a negative connotation, with the assumption that the person is wasting their time by doing nothing of value.

BatteryMAX (idle detection)

BatteryMAX is an Idle Detection System used for computer power management developed at Digital Research, Inc.'s European Development Centre (EDC) in Hungerford, UK. It was invented by British borne engineers Roger Gross and John Constant in August 1989 and was first released with DR DOS 5.0. It was created to address the new genre of portable personal computers (lap-tops) which ran from battery power. As such, it was also an integral part of Novell's PalmDOS 1.0 operating system tailored for early palmtops in 1992.

Description

Power saving in laptop computers traditionally relied on hardware inactivity timers to determine whether a computer was idle. It would typically take several minutes before the computer could identify idle behavior and switch to a lower power consumption state. By monitoring software applications from within the operating system, BatteryMAX is able to reduce the time taken to detect idle behavior from minutes to microseconds. Moreover it can switch power states around 20 times a second between a user's keystrokes. The technique was named Dynamic Idle Detection and includes halting, or stopping the CPU for periods of just a few microseconds until a hardware event occurs to restart it.

Idle (disambiguation)

Idle generally refers to a lack of motion or energy.

Idle may also refer to:

People

Places

Technology