Needles and numbers: Moses Lake mom explores the mathematics of knitting

MOSES LAKE — You might not think of math and knitting in the same sentence, but Ranée Mueller does.

“An interesting thing about knitting or crocheting is you are creating the fabric as you go,” said Mueller, the owner of Arabian Knits, the home-based company she founded to sell both her wares and her knitting patterns.

“With sewing you have the fabric, you cut it out, you shape it,” she said. “With knitting you actually create the outline that you want as you go. I can do most of that shaping as I go, and that’s really neat and I enjoy the process.”

Shaping a sweater, a scarf, a hat, a pair of gloves requires knowing how big they are going to be, how dense the stitches will be, and how much yarn you will need to get all of that done without falling short or having too much left over.

“Mathematics,” she said, wearing a red sweater and a blue headband and carrying a lavender and cream-colored knitting bag she knit herself. “Really basic math operations, algebra and geometry, is a lot of what I do.”

Mueller, a 44-year-old homeschooling mother of eight and wife of Grant County International Airport Director Rich Mueller, said she started knitting when she was 10, after her family — natives of Saudi Arabia — came to the United States to study at the University of Oregon.

“I kind of knit on and off between the ages of 10 and 20, and it was really when we had our kids I started to pick it up more seriously,” she said.

Part of it was the creative outlet, something fairly easy to do while paying attention to other things — like children practicing reading.

“And part of it is it was something that was finished when I was done with it. I picked it up, I had measurable progress,” she said. “I could see when I was done, and when I was finished with it, I was finished with it.”

More than 20 years later, and she’s had patterns published both in print and online, and Ravelry — the online website for knit and crochet patterns — hosts a number of her patterns for sale.

While “there aren’t millions to be made” selling knitting patterns, Mueller said she’s managed to gather something of a following online of people who read her blog posts — many of them Middle Eastern food recipes — and knit the things she designs.

Like most designers, Mueller said she started crafting her own custom patterns because the ones she was using didn’t quite work, and she needed to change it.

“Almost every designer I know has the same story,” she said. “This didn’t fit what I wanted. It wasn’t my size, or it wasn’t the way that I liked it.”

“And then you start to say, I know math, I know how this works, I can do this,” Mueller added.

The math is important because as she pitched proposals to publishers, she had to provide samples, and extrapolate from smaller squares just how much yarn a project will need.

“And you round up a little bit so there’s a little wiggle room, but that’s part of my work, and they want to know, and I can’t be off,” Mueller said.

There is also a marketing angle, the story a pattern designer tells when she pitches a design. Mueller said that’s called “the romance text,” and tries to describe the things that inspired the design, the stitch pattern, the colors used, and even a sense of who the designer might be as a person.

“Sometimes that’s the hardest part. Sometimes, ‘It’s my kid’s head was cold and needed a hat,’ and that doesn’t sound as inspiring,” she said.

“People want to see a peek into what you’re doing,” Mueller explained. “The reality is in some ways I’m selling who I am, and so sometimes that’s ‘This is where I messed up and had to redo it,’ and that gives people a sense of who you are as a designer.”

Mueller has found, over the years, some of her customers, at least in their minds, have a very different understanding of their relationship than she does.

“They know a lot more about me than I know about them,” Mueller said. “I’ll get notes from people that are actually remarkably personal notes, and it’s a little surprising, because I feel like I don’t know you.”

“But then I have to remember they’ve been watching and reading and they know more about me,” she added. “And I want them to have that familiarity.”

Mueller’s work and recipes can be found at arabianknits.blogspot.com and www.ravelry.com/stores/arabian-knits-designs.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.