Herbert Niebling

Herbert Niebling's designs have remained popular in the modern day, although amassing a complete catalogue of his work has been difficult as some of his patterns have been published without attribution. The social knitting site Ravelry currently lists 440 different knitting patterns designed by Niebling with many thousands of individual projects inspired by those designs posted by their users. The Herbert Niebling enthusiast group on Ravelry was founded in 2007 and has over 3,000 members as of 2019.

In February 1957, Niebling and his wife moved to Freiburg. In his studio he also made shawls for Valais costumes, as well as Spanish mantillas and lace hats for the Sunday best of the peasant women in the Bretagne. He died on May 15, 1966, in Freiburg.

He married Olga Linda Zehring on July 27, 1935, in Brandis. The couple lived in Itzehoe from 1935 to 1940, at which time Niebling was drafted to serve in the German army during the second World War. After returning home from a prisoner of war camp in June 1945, he and his wife made their home in Bensheim. He began publishing lace patterns inspired by the flowers in his garden, and was known as the "Spitzenkönig von der Bergstraße" (King of Lace from the Bergstraße).

In addition to mastering a new style of knit lace, Niebling also worked with his publisher in the 1930s to develop a set of universal symbols to represent the individual stitches in lace patterns which enabled an entire row of stitches to be read at a glance. This allowed the patterns to be more comprehensible and bring a wider readership for his publications. Publisher Aenne Burda purchased the Beyer publishing rights in 1963, and still uses the chart symbols Niebling originally developed.

As a nine-year-old, he created a piece of gobelin embroidery directly from a postcard reproduction of an old master painting without first having re-drawn it into a pattern template. He designed his first knitted lace doilies soon after. He went on to attend the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, where he studied a variety of crafts during his 4-year apprenticeship, ranging from ceramics to tapestry. Nevertheless, it was at knitting design that he most excelled. He published his first knit lace patterns with Otto Beyer in the early 1930s. Publications from 1936 list his residence as Itzehoe.

Herbert Niebling developed his style from working lace patterns disseminated in magazines and leaflets he read as a young boy. The first one he was exposed to was a design by Marie Niedner and Gussi von Reden published by Otto Beyer in 1921 as Band 46: Kunst-Stricken I. The designs of that time were geometric spirals and motifs which could be replicated and expanded to create a kaleidoscope effect. In contrast, Niebling's own later designs were not simply repetitive and geometric, but contained concentrated waves of increases and decreases to create fluid shapes portraying leaves and flowers.

Herbert Niebling (December 20, 1903 – May 15, 1966) was a master designer of the style of lace knitting called Kunststricken (art-knitting). Today, his designs remain popular with lace knitting enthusiasts.