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I included the Mooncrush Pullover by Jaq Studio on my 2025 Make Nine list. Although now we’re a quarter of the way through 2026, I did finish this pullover in 2025.
Mooncrush Pullover is a boxy sweater with seamless set-in sleeves. What sets this apart from other sweaters is the eyecatching but simple intarsia colourwork. The pattern includes 9 sizes, options for cropped or full length, options for a scoop neck or crew neck, tips for working intarsia, yarn requirements and instructions for making a 2- or 3-colour version, and original charts for the intarsia panels across the size range.
I knit this sweater with some fingering weight yarn from my stash. Pizzicato is a fingering-weight yarn that is 80% Bluefaced Leicester and 20% nylon, hand-dyed by indie dyer Sweet Paprika Designs in Montreal. I’ve used their yarn before, including their base Crescendo in the Attic Windows Baby Blanket, and their base Norwood in my Ginger pullover. I love the drape and the shine of the BFL yarn. However, I found this yarn started to pill after wearing the sweater over the winter.
To knit, I cast on using 2.75 mm needles for the ribbing back in April 2025. The colours Palestra, Larkspur, and Peacock are beautiful jewel-toned hues, and together they remind me of a Star Trek costume. That’s perfectly fine by me, as I love Star Trek! I call this my Jake Sisko sweater. For the stockinette, I used 3.25 mm needles. The pattern instructs you to knit the whole sweater flat, which means the colourwork effect comes from intarsia knitting. It took me a while to figure out the yarn twisting together to ensure that the knitting wasn’t full of holes. Thankfully I only had to frog the first centimetre of knitting once. I had already tried out intarsia knitting with theAttic Windows Baby Blanket, so I just had to get back into it.
I knit size 4 in order to get a loose and comfortable fit. In total, I used 1,130 metres of yarn to knit this full length, long-sleeve, scoop neck sweater. Thankfully I had two skeins each of Palestra and Larkspur. That means I used those two colours for the sections that include the arms. I really like the fluid shapes of the colourwork, however I was slightly disappointed in how the colours meet in the underarm. There is a clear jog where the front meets the back on the right side. I’m sure grading it would be very difficult to ensure a fluid join for all the sizes, but I was nonetheless a bit let down.
I initially knit the crew neck option, but I found that this created a very tight neckline. The front neck edge crept up the front of my neck. In the end, I ripped out the crew neck shaping and reknit it with the scoop neck. I didn’t want such a wide neckline that the scoop created, so I picked up and knit nine rounds of ribbing. In keeping with the colour-blocking, I knit the neckline with intarsia colourwork too, matching the colours from the body. Above you can see the crew neck on the left, and the scoop neck on the right. If you knit this sweater, did you find the crew neck too high as well?
Another issue with grading came up with the cuffs. I found the cuffs to be quite tight. I know my hands are on the larger side but none of my other sweaters had such tight cuffs. Of course I could have ripped back and not decreased as much, but the issue isn’t that big a deal.
If you’ve never tried intarsia, this is a great pattern to try out. For the three-colour version, you just start with two colours and then there are only easy, gradual colour shaping. The pattern also offers an option of just using two colours throughout.
Get the Mooncrush Pullover pattern on Ravelry here.
