The Nine Patch List

There’s a ready-made versus hand knitted discussion I’m often roped into, which starts off revolving around the price we pay for the wool we knit our sweaters with. Mostly it goes along the lines of.. ‘Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy it ready made?!’. ..followed by me conceding that ‘Yes it would’, but with the caveat that if it’s cheaper and its ready-made it’s probably knitted with crappier wool, and then that’s the bit where we get to explain that the more socially, animally, environmentally conscious wool makers who we buy hand knitting wool from, tend to make nicer wool. And then I try to explain that as well as the sweater you’re going to make with the wool, you also get a totally great experience. This is where my antagonist non-knitters’ eyes glaze over or worse, roll skyward, as I still haven’t really found the words which translate properly – and I know I may as well be explaining string theory to the troupe of stuffed animals that sit on the shop’s bench.

Still there’s a part of me which doesn’t want to give up. I think everyone really should know how great it feels to knit a sweater and wear it. And given that I’ve not been very successful at arguing the point in normal prose, I thought I’d revisit a format beloved of journal-ers, exam revisers, and successful supermarket shoppers. Oh how I love a list!

So here is my Nine Patch List, named after the pattern which made it happen. Nine Patch by Julie Wiesenberger is a cardigan covered in differently coloured small intarsia squares.

The Nine Patch List: Experiences I’ve had in the 3 months it took me to finish my Nine Patch

• Learned a new method for creating a shoulder seam using lifted right and left increases which creates a beautiful finish and sits behind the shoulder in a way that fits my back so perfectly that for the first time I have a cardigan that doesn’t fall off my shoulders when it’s open.
• Discovered a super-pleasing way of locking in a new yarn when starting a new colour section, by wrapping the tail around both needle tips before pulling the stitch through.
• Played bingo and ate pizza with 3 lovely knitters during a weekend away in Edinburgh, when I also unexpectedly ran into a natural dyer who I love and hadn’t seen for ages, whose yarn I’d just finished knitting into 2 of the intarsia squares.
• Turned over a new leaf ends-wise by weaving in my ends as I went along

• Found a small ball of yarn with enough left for a square, in an astonishing sky blue shade with almost secret float-away speckles of yellow and dark pink which was left over from the yarns which The Wool Kitchen dyed for the Dodo and Mimosa Ducklings project in 2023.

• Discovered that if I abandoned using bobbins for all the different patches of colour I had in a row, in favour of working out exactly how much yarn I needed (2 arm wingspans), the long tails were in fact easier to manage
• Made friends with beige – or a kind of low key neutral brownish tone of Mondim, as a compliant background colour to all the noise of the coloured squares.
• Worked out how to unravel a square of colour and re-knit it, without having to undo the rest of the rows that it was a part of.
• Borrowed some Xolla Pastoreta from another project in progress simply because I couldn’t wait to use it, and learned that it gets along just fine with the Mondim and the J&S Jumperweight it’s cohabiting with.
• Also discovered that the much smoother John Arbon Exmoor Sock is perfectly at home in this colour rave with all the much woollier yarns.
• Added a new short-row technique called Shadow Wraps, to my short-row repertoire. Would I use it again? Yes, maybe but I’d like to understand why the shadow wraps I made on the knit side look neater than the ones I made on the purl side.
• Managed to knit 2 intarsia sleeves seamlessly on circular needles by working rows with a short row turn at the end.
• Discovered that one of the reasons why the chaos of colour is not completely incoherent, is that there are some key crazies in there – the Exmoor Sock Oddmedodd chartreuse and the Mondim A586 shocking pink have taken a lead and act like safety rails for the rest to hold onto.

So there you have it. 45 years of knitting later, there are still new stitches to encounter, techniques to master, colours to combine, constructions to discover. And all of these things will illuminate and enrich your world in a way that buying a ready-made sweater never can.