Herbert Niebling is fairly famous for making a lot of lace.  A lot of his lace uses hex mesh (repetitive holes that look like a hexagon,) and floral shapes.  Some of his lace literally requires you to change needles since it literally is pushing the limits of what the lace can do. Lyra is an example of it, since the sheer force of the large flowers sometimes forces the lace into a cupped shape in the area where they appear.

For an example of someone from a similar era, but a different look, take a look at Christine Duchow.  Her work tends to be more geometric in comparison to Niebling.

So, one of the problems with Niebling is that his super early books are literally hand charted.  Some of his patterns are missing since they were literally glass slides with the finished work and the pattern, and they were smashed / lost over the years.  Hand charts can be hard to read and are rarely checked after they’re drawn.  While Niebling wasn’t sloppy in his work, a tablecloth sized pattern can often have mistakes within large parts that are repetitive, since you “learn” the pattern and simply knit the pattern according to what you expect.

So, missing patterns, hard to read patterns, mistakes in patterns, and you’re looking at things dating back more than 60 years with a war in between.  Niebling patterns pop up in Italian magazines, German magazines, some American doily magazines, French women’s magazines, and dubiously legal copies pop up in Polish and Russian magazines.  There’s literally versions of a “rose” tablecloth in a Japanese magazine that has the stems, leaves, and then dead heads off the roses.

Another issue is that if you’re dealing with a very early Niebling pattern, you’ve got abbreviated German instructions, sometimes written in fraktur.  Imagine, say, “k 8 rpts of pattern, row 10, 20, 30, move marker back 1 st. at end of round” or an oval doily where you knit a circle, and then knit two arches on either side of it.