Sweater No. 9 // My Favourite Things Knitwear
There is something quietly ceremonial about casting on for a new sweater. You choose the yarn carefully, maybe hold a few skeins up to the light or rub a length of it between your fingers to test how it will feel against skin. You swatch — or, if you are like most knitters I know, you swatch with the full intention of swatching and then somehow find yourself winding yarn onto needles at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, trusting your gauge and your instincts in equal measure. And then the thing begins to grow, stitch by stitch, row by row, until one day you are seaming the shoulders and realising that this particular project has been living with you through a season, a mood, an entire chapter of your life.
Sweater No. 9 is that kind of project for me.
This is a post I have been sitting on for a while, partly because I wanted to finish the sweater properly before writing about it, and partly because writing about a favourite thing always feels like a small risk. You want the words to be equal to the feeling, and they rarely are. But here we are, sweater folded on the arm of my sofa, a cup of tea going cold beside the keyboard, and I think it is finally time.
How Sweater No. 9 Started
I have been numbering my sweaters for the last few years. It started as a practical habit — a way of keeping track of what I had made, in what order, with what yarn — but it has gradually become something I look forward to. There is a small notebook where each sweater gets a page: the pattern name, the designer, the yarn weight, the colourway, the needle size, any modifications I made, and a few sentences about how the knitting felt and what was happening in my life while I made it.
Sweater No. 1 was a humble ribbed pullover in a dusty green wool that I wore until the elbows went thin. Sweater No. 5 was a disaster I am still not fully over — a cable yoke pattern I sized incorrectly that lives in a bag in the back of my wardrobe, too beautiful to frog and too unwearable to put on. Sweater No. 7 was the one I knitted during a long, quiet winter, and it remains one of my most-worn garments.
Sweater No. 9 came about because I wanted to make something that felt genuinely personal. Not personal in the sense of initials knitted into a hem, but personal in the sense of being made up entirely of things I have come to love over years of knitting. The construction method I find most satisfying. The yarn that makes me happiest to work with. The silhouette I reach for again and again when I am getting dressed in the morning. The little details I keep returning to in pattern after pattern, whether or not they are officially part of the design.
It is a sweater assembled, in some sense, from a running list of my favourite things.
The Pattern
I designed the basic structure myself, working from sketches and a lot of scribbled numbers, though I leaned heavily on principles I have absorbed from years of reading patterns by designers I admire. The shape is a relaxed drop-shoulder pullover with a slightly boxy fit — not oversized to the point of drowning in it, but comfortable in the way that a good coat is comfortable, with room to layer and move.
The construction is worked top-down in the round, which is one of my all-time favourite ways to knit a sweater. I know there are passionate advocates for flat construction with set-in sleeves, and I genuinely respect that position, but for me, the seamless top-down method has a flow to it that feels meditative. You begin at the neckline, increase outward for the yoke, divide for the body and sleeves, and then just keep going in long, uninterrupted rounds until the thing is nearly done. There is very little finishing. There are almost no seams. The whole process has a satisfying continuity that I find deeply calming.
The yoke is worked in a simple textured stitch pattern — a combination of knit and purl that creates a subtle relief without being as demanding as cables or as fiddly as lace. I wanted something that would hold my attention without requiring me to count every single stitch, because I do most of my knitting in the evenings when the day has already done most of my counting for me.
The neckline is a wide, relaxed crew neck, slightly lower at the front than the back. I have knitted high turtlenecks and deep V-necks and everything in between, and I keep coming back to the crew neck as my comfort zone. It works under coats. It works with scarves. It sits well with collarless jackets and it does not compete with earrings. I have very specific opinions about necklines, as it turns out.
The sleeves are full-length and worked from the underarm down, with a gently tapered shape that ends in a folded cuff. The fold is one of those small details I keep returning to — a cuff that can be worn folded back for a casual look or unfolded when the weather demands it. Practical and, I think, quietly elegant.
The Yarn
If I am honest, the yarn came before the pattern. This sweater started as a yarn purchase I could not justify at the time but made anyway, which is, I would argue, the most classic origin story for any knitting project.
The yarn is a single-ply woollen-spun aran weight from a small UK wool producer. I am not going to name the specific colourway here because it has since sold out and I do not want to send anyone down a rabbit hole of disappointment, but I will describe it: a deep, muted teal that shifts toward grey in certain lights and toward blue in others. It is the colour of the sea on an overcast afternoon in late October, which happens to be one of my favourite things to look at in the world.
Woollen-spun yarn is one of those things I became obsessed with gradually and then all at once. The difference between woollen-spun and worsted-spun — which refers to the preparation of the fibres before spinning, not the weight — is the kind of detail that sounds nerdy until you work with both and feel the difference in your hands. Woollen-spun yarn has a loftier, bouncier quality. It traps more air, which means the finished fabric is lighter and warmer than you might expect from its weight. It also has a slight halo, a soft blurriness at the edge of each stitch, which gives the finished fabric a gentle, lived-in quality even when it is brand new.
This particular yarn knits up beautifully. The stitches bloom a little when you wash the finished piece, filling in any gaps and settling into a dense, cosy fabric that drapes well without being heavy. It is not a yarn that forgives sloppy tension — the woollen-spun construction means every stitch is visible in a way that a tightly twisted yarn might hide — but I find that a feature rather than a bug. It keeps me honest.
The Knitting of It
I started Sweater No. 9 in late autumn and finished it in the depths of winter, which feels appropriate for the colour and the weight of it.
The yoke went quickly, as yokes usually do when you are working on short circular needles and the stitch count is still manageable. I worked the textured pattern from memory after the first few rows, which gave me the freedom to knit while listening to podcasts and audiobooks, which is one of my great pleasures in life. I knitted through several episodes of a documentary series about mountain landscapes, through the better part of an audiobook about food history, and through approximately four hundred cups of tea.
The body was longer and more meditative. There is a section in every sweater body, usually somewhere between the underarm and the hem, where the knitting becomes so familiar that it stops being knitting and becomes something else — a kind of moving stillness, if that makes any sense. Your hands know exactly what they are doing. Your mind is elsewhere or nowhere. The yarn moves through your fingers in a steady rhythm. I love that section. I look forward to it in every project, and it always arrives without warning.
I modified the hem slightly from my original sketch, adding a few extra rows of a tighter ribbing than I had planned. I had been looking at photographs of old Aran sweaters and Norwegian fishermen’s sweaters, and I was struck by how the ribbed welts on those garments have a structural quality — they are not just decorative, they keep the fabric from flaring or curling, they give the sweater its upright posture. My added ribbing gave Sweater No. 9 that same quality of intentionality at the hem, and I am glad I made the change.
The sleeves were knitted simultaneously on two circular needles using the magic loop method, which I know is not everyone’s preference but which I have come to find more efficient than knitting one at a time. It also means both sleeves are identical in length, which is something I cannot always guarantee when I knit them separately.
The Finishing
Finishing is, I think, the part of sweater knitting that gets the least romantic attention in the knitting world, which is a pity because it is also the part that most determines how the finished garment looks and feels on the body.
I blocked Sweater No. 9 over the course of a long Sunday afternoon. The blocking process for a woollen-spun yarn is particularly satisfying: you soak the finished piece in cool water until it is fully saturated, press out the excess water by rolling it in a towel, and then lay it flat to dry on a blocking mat, easing it gently into the shape you want. The yarn responds dramatically to this process. The fabric relaxes, the stitches even out, and the whole garment seems to settle into its final form as if it has been waiting all along to become this particular thing.
I wove in the ends — there were mercifully few of them, thanks to the top-down construction — with a blunt tapestry needle, burying each one through the backs of several stitches to ensure they would not work their way loose with wear and washing.
And then I tried it on.
Wearing It
Sweater No. 9 fits the way I hoped it would, which is not something I can say about every sweater I have made. It sits on the shoulders with a soft, easy weight. The neckline falls exactly where I sketched it. The body is long enough to tuck in or leave out, which gives it more versatility than a shorter hem would. The sleeves are warm without being constricting.
I have worn it with jeans and with wide-leg trousers and with a long linen skirt that is technically a summer skirt but which I wear year-round with the right layers underneath. I have worn it over a shirt with a collar, letting the collar fan out above the crewneck in a way that I have loved ever since I first saw it on a photograph from the 1970s. I have worn it on walks and at my desk and at dinner and curled up on the sofa reading, which is perhaps the most important category of activities a sweater needs to pass.
It pills slightly on the cuffs after washing, which is characteristic of woollen-spun yarns, but I do not mind. I consider pilling a sign of a sweater being genuinely used rather than merely owned.
On the Idea of Favourite Things
I want to say something about the concept of favourite things, because it is the second half of this post’s title and I think it deserves a few sentences.
There is a particular kind of knowledge that accumulates slowly over years of doing something you love. It is not theoretical knowledge — you do not learn it from books or tutorials, though those help — but a practical, embodied knowledge that comes from repetition and attention and the gradual willingness to trust your own preferences. When I look back at my early knitting projects, I can see a person who was following other people’s decisions: the yarn weights they specified, the construction methods they chose, the silhouettes they designed. That is exactly where you should start, and those early projects taught me everything.
But somewhere along the way, I began to accumulate a collection of my own preferences. I know which construction methods feel good in my hands. I know which stitch patterns I find engaging versus tedious. I know which yarn fibres I reach for in which seasons. I know which silhouettes I will actually wear versus the ones I admire in photographs and never put on my body.
Sweater No. 9 is the most complete expression of those preferences that I have managed so far. It is not my most technically ambitious project. It is not the most intricate pattern or the most expensive yarn. But it is the sweater that feels most like mine, in the deepest sense of that word.
What Comes Next
Sweater No. 10 is already swirling around in my imagination. I have been thinking about colour for the first time in a while — perhaps a warm rust or a deep ochre, something that would be the opposite of this muted teal in every way but would still feel like part of the same handwriting. I have been looking at patterns with more structural elements: increases used for shaping rather than just for yokes, maybe a saddle shoulder construction I have been curious about for years.
But for now, Sweater No. 9 is the one on my body and on my mind. It is exactly what I hoped it would be, which is not a small thing. In knitting as in life, the gap between what you imagine and what you make can be a wide and sometimes discouraging distance. When the two things meet — when the object in your hands matches the one in your mind — it feels like a gift.
I hope whatever you are making right now feels the same way, or that it will soon.
Happy knitting.
