Normalising fractional numbers
Not clear of your process, but here is how it can be done:
$\tfrac{9}{16} = \tfrac{1}{16} + \tfrac12$,
which gives you $0.1001$ in binary form. To normalize, take the first bit to be 1, which gives you $1.001 \times 2^{-1}$ which makes 3 bits for the mantissa $001$ and some bits for the exponent to represent $-1$ in twos' complement.

IEEE floating point formats don't use twos' complement for negative mantissas: they use an extra bit to indicate the sign (1 means negative).

So in the end, if exponent is 4 bit (and without any excess exponent): $1\,1111\,001$.