Among those who knitted lace from their leaflets was a precocious young knitter who already as a schoolboy had begun knitting the “modern” lace and who was destined to become the acknowledged grand master of lace knitting.īorn December 20, 1903, in Averlak in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, Herbert Richard Niebling learned to knit at an early age. Worked in fine cotton crochet threads or the newly invented -rayon or “art silk,” the geometric designs bear many resemblances to traditional doilies, but the larger scale allows the kaleidoscopic forms to blossom into full-sized tablecloths. The first lace designers to use this method were Christine Duchrow, Gussi von Reden, and Marie Niedner their charted designs were widely disseminated in magazines and in individual leaflets. Such patterns had the advantage of requiring fewer words and therefore less space on the printed page. The idea of writing patterns using symbols-letters and numbers-to indicate the type and number of stitches in each row seems to have arisen in Germany toward the end of the century. The first written knitting patterns had appeared in the 1830s, unwieldy affairs with line-by-line instructions dictating each stitch. But whereas the simple combinations and repetitive motifs of folk knitting had been easily memorized, allowing projects to be easily portable, patterns for the new, larger, and more complex designs had to be written out, and the knitter was tied more closely to them. Rather than combining repetitions of small motifs and edgings in concentric bands as in traditional Shetland and Russian lace knitting, German designers used the more intricate twisted and crossed stitches of their tradition to make bolder, unified design statements. The patterns of Kunststricken (“art knitting” in German, later introduced to English knitters as “Viennese” or “modern” lace knitting) drew on the lace stitches of the Bavarian and Tyrolean folk traditions to produce sophisticated designs for pieces much larger than the traditional stockings, sweaters, and gloves. At the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany, lace knitting was taking a new direction.
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